What is 0x%08lx?

Question

I've been getting a lot of blue screens on my XP box at work recently. So many in fact that I downloaded debugging tools for windows(x86) and have been analyzing the crash dumps. So many in fact that I've changed the dumps to mini only or else I would probably end up tanking half a work day each week just waiting for the blue screen to finish recording the detailed crash log.

Almost without exception every dump tells me that the cause of the blue screen is some kind of memory misallocation or misreference and the memory at 0x%08lx referenced 0x%08lx and could not be %s.

Out of idle curiosity I put "0x%08lx" into Google and found that quite a few crash dumps include this bizarre message. Am I to take it that 0x%08lx is a place holder for something that should be meaningful? "%s" which is part of the concluding sentence "The memory could not be %s" definitely looks like it's missing a variable or something.

Does anyone know the provenance of this message? Is it actually supposed to be useful and what is it supposed to look like?

It's not a major thing I have always worked around it. It's just strange that so many people should see this in so many crash dumps and nobody ever says: "Oh the crash dump didn't complete that message properly it's supposed to read..."

I'm just curious as to whether anyone knows the purpose of this strange error message artefact.

Answer 1

0x%08lx and %s are almost certainly format specifiers for the C function sprintf. But looks like the driver developers did as good a job in their error handling code as they did in the critical code, as you should never see these specifiers in the GUI -- they should be replaced with meaningful values.

0x%08lx should turn into something like "0xE001D4AB", a hexadecimal 32-bit pointer value.

%s should be replaced by another string, in this case a description. Something like

the memory at 0xE001D4AB referenced 0xE005123F and could not be read.

Note that I made up the values. Basically, a kernel mode access violation occurred. Hopefully in the mini dumps you can see which module caused it and uninstall / update / whatever it.

Answer 2

I believe it is just the placeholder for the memory address. 0x is a string prefix that would notify the user that it is an hexadecimal, while %08lx is the actual placeholder for a long int (l) converted to hexadecimal (x) with a padding of 8 zeroes (08).