Matthew Douglas Hendel, 565150 S Orchard St, Seattle, WA 98118

7028056, Apr 11, 2006

Apr 14, 2000

09/549814

Matthew D. Hendel - Seattle WA, US
Kent Forschmiedt - Shoreline WA, US

Microsoft Corporation - Redmond WA

G06F 17/30

707202, 707204, 707206

Methods and arrangements are provided that substantially reduce the requisite amount of data required to conduct postmortem analysis following a computer failure. The methods and arrangements can be advantageously configured to allow for rapid online user support for a variety of users, computing devices, operating systems, applications, and the like. One method includes determining when to generate a dump file, and generating a dump file by gathering thread, callstack and thread context information for the running thread, process identifying information associated with the running thread, and information identifying the reason for generating the dump file. The resulting dump file is then stored to a storage medium and accessed during subsequent analysis. The dump file can be a kernel minidump file that is associated with an operating system program failure, in which case the running thread is the single thread that was running when the failure occurred. The kernel minidump file would include the kernel callstack and the process identifying information that would identify the process that initiated the single thread.

7127642, Oct 24, 2006

Mar 23, 2004

10/808877

Landy Wang - Redmond WA, US
Matthew D. Hendel - Seattle WA, US

Microsoft Corporation - Redmond WA

G06F 11/00

714 45, 714 37

A system and method for self-diagnosing a likely cause of a system crash is disclosed. A mechanism within an operating system checks for the existence of a stop code at startup of the machine. The existence of the stop code indicates that the system crashed during the previous session, and the type of system crash. The mechanism may read the stop code and implement a self-diagnostic procedure that corresponds to that stop code. In this manner, the mechanism may automate many of the tasks normally performed by humans, such as a system administrator, to self-diagnose the likely cause of the crash. If the crash occurs again, the mechanism, through the tracking procedures automatically implemented, may identify and report to a system administrator the likely cause of the crash, e. g. the particular faulty driver or configuration error.

7206866, Apr 17, 2007

Dec 5, 2003

10/729138

Matthew D. Hendel - Seattle WA, US
Fnu Sidhartha - Bellevue WA, US
Jane Win-Shih Liu - Bellevue WA, US

Microsoft Corporation - Redmond WA

G06F 3/00
G06F 13/00

710 6, 710 33, 710 58, 711158, 718102

The present invention relates to a system and methodology to facilitate I/O access to a computer storage medium in a predictable and efficient manner. A scheduling system is provided that mitigates the problem of providing differing levels of performance guarantees for disk I/O in view of varying levels of data access requirements. In one aspect, the scheduling system includes an algorithm or component that provides high performance I/O updates while maintaining high throughput to the disk in a bounded or determined manner. This is achieved by dynamically balancing considerations of I/O access time and latency with considerations of data scheduling requirements. Also, the system provides latency boundaries for multimedia applications as well as managing accesses for other applications.

7299337, Nov 20, 2007

May 12, 2005

11/128665

Eric P. Traut - Bellevue WA, US
Matthew D. Hendel - Seattle WA, US
Rene Antonio Vega - Kirkland WA, US

G06F 9/26

711206, 711207

Enhanced shadow page table algorithms are presented for enhancing typical page table algorithms. In a virtual machine environment, where an operating system may be running within a partition, the operating system maintains it's own guest page tables. These page tables are not the real page tables that map to the real physical memory. Instead, the memory is mapped by shadow page tables maintained by a virtualing program, such as a hypervisor, that virtualizes the partition containing the operating system. Enhanced shadow page table algorithms provide efficient ways to harmonize the shadow page tables and the guest page tables. Specifically, by using tagged translation lookaside buffers, batched shadow page table population, lazy flags, and cross-processor shoot downs, the algorithms make sure that changes in the guest pages tables are reflected in the shadow page tables.

7334076, Feb 19, 2008

Mar 8, 2005

11/075219

Matthew D. Hendel - Seattle WA, US
Eric Traut - Bellevue WA, US

Microsoft Corporation - Redmond WA

G06F 12/00

711 6, 711147

A method of sharing pages between virtual machines in a multiple virtual machine environment includes initially allocating a temporary guest physical address range of a first virtual machine for sharing pages with a second virtual machine. The temporary range is within a guest physical address space of the first virtual machine. An access request, such as with a DMA request, from a second virtual machine for pages available to the first virtual machine is received. A reference count of pending accesses to the pages is incremented to indicate a pending access and the ages are mapped into the temporary guest physical address range. The pages are accessed and the reference count is decremented. The mapping in the temporary guest physical address range is then removed if the reference count is zero.

7398430, Jul 8, 2008

Oct 12, 2006

11/549073

Landy Wang - Redmond WA, US
Matthew D. Hendel - Seattle WA, US

Microsoft Corporation - Redmond WA

G06F 11/00

714 45, 714 37

A system and method for self-diagnosing a likely cause of a system crash is disclosed. A mechanism within an operating system checks for the existence of a stop code at startup of the machine. The existence of the stop code indicates that the system crashed during the previous session, and the type of system crash. The mechanism may read the stop code and implement a self-diagnostic procedure that corresponds to that stop code. In this manner, the mechanism may automate many of the tasks normally performed by humans, such as a system administrator, to self-diagnose the likely cause of the crash. If the crash occurs again, the mechanism, through the tracking procedures automatically implemented, may identify and report to a system administrator the likely cause of the crash, e. g. the particular faulty driver or configuration error.

7434003, Oct 7, 2008

Nov 15, 2005

11/274907

Adrian J. Oney - Woodinville WA, US
Bryan Mark Willman - Kirkland WA, US
Eric P. Traut - Bellevue WA, US
Forrest Curtis Foltz - Woodinville WA, US
John Te-Jui Sheu - Redmond WA, US
Matthew D. Hendel - Seattle WA, US
Rene Antonio Vega - Kirkland WA, US

Microsoft Corporation - Redmond WA

G06F 12/10

711135, 711 6, 711207

An operating system is described that is capable of ascertaining whether it is executing in a virtual machine environment and is further capable of modifying its behavior to operate more efficiently and provide optimal behavior in a virtual machine environment. An operating system is enlightened so that it is aware of VMMs or hypervisors, taking on behavior that is optimal to that environment. The VMM or hypervisor informs the operating system of the optimal behavior, and vice versa.

7475183, Jan 6, 2009

Dec 12, 2005

11/299409

Eric P. Traut - Bellevue WA, US
Idan Avraham - Seattle WA, US
Matthew D. Hendel - Seattle WA, US

Microsoft Corporation - Redmond WA

G06F 12/10

711 6, 711206

Provided are optimizations to the memory virtualization model employed in a virtual machine environment. An opportunistic hypervisor page mapping process is used in order to utilize large memory pages in a virtual machine environment. Using these optimizations, physical memory is being virtualized for the virtual machine in a manner that allows the operating system (OS) running within the virtual machine to take real and full advantage of large physical memory pages.