"STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION" on Win 95

[Barry McMullin]

Ok Folks, can anybody shed any light on this tale of woe:

I'm running swarm 1.1 on Windows 95 with the help of the
cygnus cdk b19.

I got swarm built successfully; I also got heatbugs built
and executing successfully.

I went through the porting doc to port my own app (SCL)
to swarm 1.1.  Got it to the point where it would
build successfully.  It executed to a point - bringing
up windows, letting me do parameter setting etc.  But when I 
pressed "Start" it crashed:

(C:\USERS\MCMULLIN\ETC\RESEARCH\SWARM-STUFF\SCL0.05\SCL.EXE 1004) 
  Exception: STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION
(C:\USERS\MCMULLIN\ETC\RESEARCH\SWARM-STUFF\SCL0.05\SCL.EXE 1004) 
  Dumping stack trace to SCL.EXE.core


I tried running under gdb.  gdb seemed pretty flakey as 
well.  I had not used gdb under the cdk before this, so I
don't know if this was specific to my app, specific to
swarm apps, or a cdk thing.  Anyway, I managed to capture
this:

===============

(gdb) run
Starting program: /users/mcmullin/etc/research/swarm-stuff/scl0.05/scl.exe
7fe90000:/WINDOWS/SYSTEM/COMDLG32.DLL
66300000:/SYS/GNUWIN32/B19/H-I386-CYGWIN32/BIN/CYGTK80.DLL
66000000:/SYS/GNUWIN32/B19/H-I386-CYGWIN32/BIN/CYGTCL80.DLL
bff30000:/WINDOWS/SYSTEM/GDI32.DLL
bff60000:/WINDOWS/SYSTEM/USER32.DLL
bff70000:/WINDOWS/SYSTEM/KERNEL32.DLL
bfec0000:/WINDOWS/SYSTEM/ADVAPI32.DLL
10000000:/SYS/GNUWIN32/B19/H-I386-CYGWIN32/BIN/CYGWINB19.DLL
7c6c0000:/WINDOWS/SYSTEM/WSOCK32.DLL
bfb80000:/WINDOWS/SYSTEM/COMCTL32.DLL
7fdc0000:/WINDOWS/SYSTEM/SHELL32.DLL

[failed reading symbols from DLL]
"/WINDOWS/SYSTEM/SHLWAPI.DLL": error reading line numbers

7cbb0000:/WINDOWS/SYSTEM/URL.DLL


SCL v0.05.10 - An artificial chemistry simulation.
Copyright (C) 1996 Barry McMullin
http://www.eeng.dcu.ie/~mcmullin

SWARM kernel Copyright (C) 1996 Santa Fe Institute
http://www.santafe.edu

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program in the file LICENSE.TXT; if not,
write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

7110000:/TOOLS_95/IMGHOOK.DLL

===================


At that point I had my swarm app windows; I went through my usual
parameter setting, pressed "Start" and got:


===================

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x10047a21 in _size_of_stack_reserve__ ()
(gdb) bt
#0  0x10047a21 in _size_of_stack_reserve__ ()
Cannot access memory at address 0x2000000.
(gdb)

===================

That backtrace doesn't mean a darned thing to me...

So: then I remembered that the swarm relase had included a
replacement for cygwinb19.dll which I had *not* installed.
So I installed it.

Now my app crashes *immediately* (no windows, no nothing) with:

~/etc/research/swarm-stuff/scl0.05$scl
(scl.exe 1010) Exception: STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION
(scl.exe 1010) Dumping stack trace to scl.exe.core

Similarly gdb (without even specifying a target to debug!):

~$gdb
(c:\sys\gnuwin32\b19\H-i386-cygwin32\bin\gdb.exe 1014) Exception: 
STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION
(c:\sys\gnuwin32\b19\H-i386-cygwin32\bin\gdb.exe 1014) Dumping stack trace to 
gdb.exe.core

This happens even with "gdb -nw" (to switch off the windowing).

So now I go back to heatbugs, as a sanity check. And guess what:

/sys/swarm/swarmapps-1.1/heatbugs$(heatbugs.exe 1011) Exception: 
STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION
(heatbugs.exe 1011) Dumping stack trace to heatbugs.exe.core


Hmmm ... browsing the cygnus site, I find a reference to a b19.1 update
to fix instability problems specifically on w95.  So I download it.
But, as far as I can tell this just *is* the "new" cygwinb19.dll included
with swarm 1.1 (can you confirm that guys?).  So *that* doesn't help.

I reverted to the original cygwinb19.dll; and the behaviour reverted
back to what I described above.  So: it looks like my problems are
*something* to do with the changes in cygwinb19.dll - albeit in
the unexpected direction (i.e. the newer cygwinb19 seems to be
even *less* stable that the earlier one...).


Well, I'm stumped for now, so I'd aprpeciate any suggestions...

- Barry.

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