Debugging a gnarly problem on Windows

[ADSWNJ]

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2016/04/25/debugging-memory-corruption-who-the-hell-writes-2-into-my-stack-2/

I saw this in reddit.com/r/programming. Quite a fascinating trail for any serious developers, and very nicely written up by the author.

 

[Col_Klonk]

Essentially why I steer clear of 'high level' languages.. you have to eventually do the Win/Kernel API work anyway, so one might as well start from the beginning.

 

[ADSWNJ]

What's interesting is that the Windows kernel on the async return just stomps on memory without any respect for the RO flags the author put on the page. Those flags are obviously just for the little guy, not the mighty kernel!

 

[Urwumpe]

What's interesting is that the Windows kernel on the async return just stomps on memory without any respect for the RO flags the author put on the page. Those flags are obviously just for the little guy, not the mighty kernel!

Isn't it good to be Kernel?

 

[Col_Klonk]

Win and Kernel APIs do a lot of stack fixups before they return, not like you usual return instruction, and it does get really messy.
The impression I get from that article was that the development were not exactly aware of what the Kernel and Win APIs are doing, and started playing at that level without keeping tabs..
It took him 5 days to discover this... heh heh.. he has a few more years to go still