Patent ID: 7437612

Claim:
A method for identifying lock ownership, comprising: identifying at least one node in a crash dump, wherein the at least one node corresponds to a memory object; characterizing the at least one node in the crash dump as a node of inferred type and appending the at least one node to a list of nodes of inferred type, wherein the at least one node is of inferred type when the at least one node is initially designated as unknown type and is referenced by another node of known type and wherein the another node of known type is in the crash dump; determining whether each node in the list of nodes of inferred type is a structure; for each node in the list of nodes determined to be a structure: determining whether each member in each node corresponds to a lock, determining an owner of the lock; determining whether each node in the list of nodes of inferred type is an array of structures, and for each node in the list of nodes determined to be the array of structures: determining whether each member in each structure in the array of structures corresponds to the lock, and determining the owner of the lock, wherein determining the owner of the lock comprises: determining an address of the member, and identifying the owner of the lock using the address.