How do I determine which are the foreground .NET threads from WinDBG?

Question

How do I determine which are the foreground .NET threads from WinDBG ? Using the !threads command the SOS extenstion tells us the count of the foreground threads but not which ones.

Anya

Answer 1

The state flag in the !threads output holds a lot of information. If the 0x00000200 flag is set the thread is a background thread.

In SOS for .NET 4 and PSSCOR2, there's a !threadstate command, that will list the texts for a given flag value. If you don't have that, there's an overview of the flags in the rotor source code and in Debugging .NET 2.0 applications by John Robbins.

Linden

Thanks a lot! It will be nice to see all the thread state flags from the SOS extension. – Anya

Answer 2

You can use the thread state values given in this link and find out if a thread is a background thread or not.

TS_Background 0x00000200 Thread is a background thread

Unmixed

Answer 3

Netext's command !wthreads shows type and status information:

0:011> !wthreads
   Id OSId Address  Domain   Alloc Start:End   COM  GC Type  Locks Type / Status             Last Exception
    1 1854 0074f580 00748cd0 02c19308:02c1b2e8 STA  Preemptive   0                          
    2 1890 0075ab18 00748cd0 00000000:00000000 MTA  Preemptive   0 Background|Finalizer     
    3 1bac 080ecb98 00748cd0 00000000:00000000 MTA  Preemptive   0 Background|Worker        
    4 ---- 08106068 00748cd0 00000000:00000000 MTA  Preemptive   0 Worker|Terminated        
    5 ---- 0810e988 00748cd0 00000000:00000000 MTA  Preemptive   0 Worker|Terminated        
    6 ---- 080eb1d0 00748cd0 00000000:00000000 MTA  Preemptive   0 Worker|Terminated        
    7 081c 080fcb48 00748cd0 00000000:00000000 MTA  Preemptive   0 Background|IOCPort

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