OpenAI resolves 18-year-old GNU libunwind bug by applying epidemiological methods to crash debugging

infoq.com

OpenAI fixed an 18-year-old bug in GNU libunwind by treating crash debugging like epidemiology, uncovering two distinct issues. The company discovered silent hardware corruption on one server and a race condition in libunwind's setcontext function. Analyzing crash data patterns, rather than individual cases, led to the breakthrough. This approach revealed the hardware issue, isolating the libunwind bug which occurred during C++ exception unwinding and was triggered by frequent signal delivery in OpenAI's systems.


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OpenAI resolves 18-year-old GNU libunwind bug by applying epidemiological methods to crash debugging | News Minimalist