Delphi 2010 BSOD Errors - delphi

We ported an application from Delphi 7 over to Delphi 2010 and have had customers encountering intermittent BSOD (blue screen of death) errors while running under Windows XP. The errors are very sporadic and have been very hard to track down. FYI : We are using the built-in memory manager from Delphi 2010.
Our first thought was a hardware issue but upgrading system drivers failed to fix the problem.
Has anyone else encountered BSOD issues under XP with Delphi 2010 generated applications? If so, do you have any suggestions on how we might correct this problem?
Thanks for your assistance!

There's nothing in the Delphi core libraries that can cause a BSOD directly. As David pointed out, Delphi programs run in user space. However, if they're sending invalid data to a kernel-space driver, that's a different matter.
You said D7-D2010 update, and the first thing that occurs to me there is the string revamp. Delphi's standard string type has been changed from AnsiString (1 byte per char) to UnicodeString (2 bytes per char) and if you're sending the wrong type of string to a driver or system routine somewhere it might cause strange behavior.
First thing I'd do is run a full build and watch for "implicit conversion" warnings from the compiler. This means that you're mixing string types. Find these and fix them and see if that helps.
Also, if you have any import units for external libraries, and they use APIs that take a string (or more likely a PChar) parameter, make sure they're converted to PAnsiChar. Delphi's already taken care of this for the Windows API stuff used in windows.pas, but if you've got any of your own you need to take care of it yourself.

BSOD can be analyzed opening the crash dump with WinDbg or other tool able to process crash dumps. Even a "minidump" will give enough informations to try to understand where and hopefully why a BSDO occurs. WinDbg can be downloaded freely, and you don't need to install it on the target machine, you can ask your customers to ship the crash dumps to you, and you can analize them offline. Anyway generating a BSOD from user mode code is usually very difficult - but there are ways to crash a system. What kind of error the BSOD displays?
Update: if the error is PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA this link explains what happened: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc957625.aspx. It usually a memory-related issue, and it may be that D2010 using more memory than older version may end up to trigger it. Could you run a memtest on those machines (http://www.memtest.org/)?
Ntkrlnpa.exe is not a driver, is the image containing the OS executive and kernel code (the version with PAE support). Using winDbg and the crash dump it is possibile to obtain the call stack leading to the crash.

Related

ActiveX/OCX can't read from disk

I just need some ideas/hints that push me into the right direction. Since the whole story is a bit more complicated I make it short: I have an OCX that itself uses a more complex DLL. When running this ActiveX it seems disk read operations fail (but I'm not 100% sure if this is the reason) and the underlying DLL causes crashes on some strange positions in code.
So my question: are there any special permissions/manifest information/whatever needed for such an ActiveX when running it with Windows 7?
Thanks!
OK, solved, is was a problem of incompatible libraries that caused a crash on a strange position in code.

Delphi Exe throws Exception code: 0xc0000005 only on Windows 7 64 Bit

I have one executable. Exe is prepared from Delphi version 5 as code is written in Delphi. This exe working successfully on Windows XP, Windows 7 with 32 bit operating system. But same executable not working on Windows 7 with 64 bit operating system. It will throw following error code Exception code: 0xc0000005.
The only option is to re compile the Delphi code and make it compatible to Windows 7 64 bit operating system.
I have Google but do not find any suitable article. Therefore, can someone please help me out to resolve this issue.
I have good idea to make executable compatible for 32 and 64 bit but only in .NET Framework. So Please help me.
That error code is the NTSTATUS code for an access violation. For you to see that error code typically means that your application has raised an access violation during initialization. Once the Delphi RTL has initialized then those errors are converted into native Delphi EAccessViolation errors. So with high probability this is an error during initialization, possibly related to the way you link to or use a dependent module.
In order to solve the problem you need to do some debugging. The first thing I would do is to use Dependency Walker in profile mode to run your application. This will give you diagnostics of the load of your process at some point, presumably during the load an initialization of a module, you will see an error. Hopefully this will lead you to a solution.
Programs built with Delphi 5 do run on 64 bit Windows. You have an error in your program that needs debugging. Simple as that. Not the easiest error to debug, but it's still just a debugging exercise with your code.

procedure _ftol2_sse being called after update to Delphi XE?

In our program we are using a web service to pull back data from a third party into our program.
Ever since we updated to Delphi XE from Delphi 2009, Windows server 2003 users are receiving the following error message when making a SOAP call to the web service.
msvcrt.dll on Server 2003 does not have the procedure _ftol2_sse which is now being called for some reason..
I know this procedure was not being called when we had our source code on Delphi 2009 because I don't get this error on Windows server 2003 when running those builds.
Is this feasible? Could a change in the IDE affect which dll procedures are being called? Does anyone have any insight or ideas on how I might track down or fix this error?
Thanks
This is the third similar question you have asked on this topic. I'll attempt to give you some background information and help you work out what is going on.
First of all it's important to know that msvcrt.dll is a system component. It is not the MSVC runtime. It is supplied as part of Windows. Back in the bad old days, in the mid-90s, a lot of devlopers assumed that the MSVC6 runtime was always available. And they neglected to install that runtime as part of their program's installation. This occasionally caused trouble when the install program happened to find a machine without MSVC6.
The MSVC team moved to differently named runtime DLLs, msvcrt70.dll, msvcrt80.dll and so on. And they educated the developers that installing the MSVC runtime should be part of all MSVC application's installation programs.
But the Windows team wanted to help out legacy apps that had installers that assumed MSVC6 runtime was available. So they took the MSVC6 runtime under their control and started shipping it with Windows. I think this started around the time of Windows 2000 or XP.
The point I am trying to make is that msvcrt.dll is a system DLL over which you have no control. In your previous questions you have described your attempts to modify that DLL. Don't do that.
Now, from what I can glean, the version of msvcrt.dll that shipped with 2003 server does not export a function named _ftol2_sse. Hardly surprising since SSE floating point was not widely available back in the days of 2003 server. Clearly something in your system is resulting in an attempt to import _ftol2_sse.
You should be able to work out what is provoking this by using Dependency Walker. Use the functions on the Profile menu to start your application and study closely the logs. You should be able to see the chain of events that lead to an attempt to link to _ftol2_sse.
I'd be surprised if any of the Windows code linked to msvcrt.dll. That library is provided purely as a prop for legacy apps that link against MSVC6. But you never know.
Also try loading your executable in Dependency Walker. Look at the list of imported DLLs. Check to see if msvcrt.dll is in the list. If so, see what functions your executable imports, and if _ftol2_sse is in that list. If so then you'll be able to find it somewhere in the Delphi source code.
From the various similar sounding reports on the web I suspect that the problem you face is benign. Many of the people reporting the same issue can OK the dialogs and have their program continue without problem. This suggests that you can simply suppress the error reporting and so solve your problem. Use the SetErrorMode function to do so. You want to include the SEM_FAILCRITICALERRORS flag.
Be aware that SetErrorMode has a rather perverse interface. Almost all code that I have ever seen uses it incorrectly. Including the code in the Delphi RTL, and so many of the commonly used Delphi third party libraries. Raymond Chen, as usual, explains how to use it correctly.
Could switching compilers provoke the behaviour change? Certainly they could. Either the library code that you are using is implemented differently. Or perhaps the error mode is somehow different at the crucial moment.

What should be tested in 64-bit Delphi

Delphi with 64 bit compilation is now in Beta, but only invited beta-testers will get their hands on this version.
What should be tested by the beta testers?
Embarcadero will probably provide a tester's guide for the beta testers. But, here are some ideas:
Memory allocation, alignment, heap and stack. 32-bit could use up to 4GB (well, 3.5) of address space on a 64-bit version of Windows with the /LARGEADDRESSAWARE switch: Delphi64 should be able to use much more. Try allocating 8, 16, and 32 GB. (Even if you have less RAM, the allocation should work since it's a virtual address space.) Now read and write values into it a certain spots: check your allocation and pointers all work. Have a look at what Process Explorer reports for the app. Inspect your stack: it runs top-down, unlike the heap - what does it looks like, what addresses is it using? What does the 16-byte alignment look like? Is that alignment kept for all internal Pascal functions, or only those that call external code? In the 32-bit VCL, there were some bits of code that weren't safe for addresses larger than 2GB. Have those been fixed? Does anything break when it's allocated in, say, the 53rd GB of your program's address space? (Try allocating a huge amount, and then dynamically creating forms, controls etc - they'll probably be created with high addresses.) Does the memory manager fragment? How fast are memory moves and copies?
Compiler warnings. (This one is important.) Upgrade your programs - compile them without changes, and see what warnings / errors you get; fix any; and then fix bugs that occur even though you weren't warned. What issues did you encounter? Should the compiler have warned you, but didn't? Do you get warnings when truncating a pointer when casting to an integer? What about more complex issues: if you use the Single floating-point type, what happens? Warning, or is it silently represented as a double? What if you pass in a parameter to a method that's a different size - for example, PostMessage and you pass in a 32-bit-sized value to the handle parameter - will the compiler be smart enough to guess that if the size is wrong, your code might be wrong, even though it's often valid to pass a smaller type to a larger parameter? Under what circumstances should it do so? (Another thing: what if you pass a 64-bit pointer to a 32-bit type in a method expecting a pointer to a 64-bit type - the type safety should yell loudly, but does it? A use case for that is reading blocks from a binary file, something that could easily cause problems with the wrong-sized types.) ...etc.
Compiler warnings are probably one of the most useful tools for people who upgrade, so the compiler should produce as many as possible, in as many situations as possible, with as few false positives as possible. Remember Delphi is used by a wide range of programmers - you may know what a warning means or recognize bad code even if the compiler is silent, but anything that will help novices (or good programmers having a bad day) is important.
Custom controls & WinAPI. You probably have a few customs controls or bits of code that make heavy use of Windows APIs instead of the VCL. Are there any Windows API-specific issues?
Language compatibility. Does the old file IO code work - AssignFile, etc? RTTI? If you have an event signature with an Integer type, and an event handler is auto-created by the IDE, is it generated as Integer or a size-specific integer type depending on the platform that's currently set? What if the event is NativeInt, what then? (I've seen bugs in event handler method signature generation before, though only on the C++ side.)
Different types of application. We can assume GUI programs have been tested well. What about console and service applications?
C++Builder compatible file generation. C++Builder won't be 64-bit in XE2, but hopefully will in XE3. Delphi can produce ..hpp and .obj files for Pascal code, though. What happens in for a 64-bit platform? Can you produce those files, even though they're useless? Does the compiler generate C++-specific warnings in 64-bit mode, or does it give up and not let you do it? In 32-bit mode, is there anything you can do for 64-bit compatibility that will generate a warning building the C++ header?
Linker. Can you link .lib and .obj files created with other compilers? (I'd expect .lib yes, .obj no.) Does the linker use COFF or OMF for 64-bit - have they changed? This thread implies an ELF format. Has it changed for 32-bit too? Does this affect the DCU format, will we still get ultra-fast compiling / linking?
COM and 64-bit plugins. Are there any marshalling issues? Can you build a 64-bit plugin for Explorer now?
Calling conventions. Safecall's supposed to be the only 'calling convention' (if safecall counts...) that's still different - does it still work? Function and procedure pointers, and closures (object method pointers): do they work? What do they look like in the debug inspector? Given all calling conventions are now the same, if you mix calling conventions in your method declaration and your calling pointer, what happens? Is there any legacy stuff around that will break or does it transparently work? Does it now give you an (erroneous) warning that the types are incompatible?
Floating point math. The Delphi 64 preview said floating point would be double only. Can Delphi handle long doubles? Are there any compatibility routines for handling the old Real (48 bits, I think??) type? Does the compiler generate SSE or SSE2 code or a mix, and how good is it?
Performance. This is their first go at a 64-bit compiler; it will probably be refined over the next few releases. But are there any obvious performance problems, with:
compiling; linking; IDE insight?
Generated code: are your programs faster or slower? Is FP math faster or slower? Does inline work, and does it generate any unnecessary header/footer bits around inlined methods?
Debugging. This is probably easiest to test through the whole process of testing everything else, but how well does the 64-bit debugger work? Does it have all functionality of the 32-bit one? Do IDE debug visualiser plugins still work? What if you debug a non-Delphi 64-bit program or attach to a process, instead of running normally?
Misc Is Delphi itself compiled as a 64-bit program? If not, why not? (Are they "eating their own dogfood"?) Code inspect the new VCL (assuming the preview comes with VCL source.) What have they done to make the VCL 32/64 compatible? Are there any errors, or if you already know 64-bit code well from other IDEs, are there better approaches they could take instead?
...etc. I could keep typing for hours, but I think that's a good start though :)
I'm sure Embarcadero will provide some testing guidance. For what it's worth this is what I'd test; Mostly because it's the stuff I care about:
Small console application should work.
Allows me to allocate a 4Gb flat hunk of memory. Don't really need that, but it will be the first thing my console application tries, right after WriteLn('I''m using all 64 bits!!!!');
Can create 64bit DLL and the DLL can be imported and used from other environment.
Do some simple things and look at the generated assembler, just for kicks.
Can create Firebird 64bit compatible UDF's
I'd probably try compiling my "utility" units, because they do an fair amount of pointer manipulation, see how they work.
If the VCL works I'd put it through it's paces: create small form, put a button on it, ShowMessage.
Generally speaking the only thing I really need 64bit Delphi for is Firebird 64bit UDFs. That's minor and can be "fixed" using FPC. I assume the best testing will be done by people that actually need 64 bit delphi. And those people don't need testing suggestions.
The base foundation stuff would come first, to ensure that Delphi 64 can be used for what Delphi 32 can't be used:
compiler correctness: first and foremost, no internal errors, no incorrect code-gen
ability to compile to 64bit DLLs and stability of those
stress the memory manager: with large objects, fragmented allocation, multi-threaded allocations, etc.
multi-threading: is it stable? is it efficient? does it scale? that for core RTL functions and units, and not forgetting the reference-counted types.
floating point: does the compiler deliver proper SSE? are the maths functions properly implemented and correct? what happens if you stress the SSE register set with complex expressions?
And as a bonus, ability to accept 64bit object files from the usual C++ compilers.
Non visual stuff ... I think. There is already success from some beta testers that already ported their libraries. I don't know the preview but from the information I don't have I would assume more complex non visual scenarios currently make sense. Anyone who knows it better please correct me ...
I think the preview first allows you to setup a migration strategy, this would be my intention. The VCL ... intended to work on one code base and maybe backport your code to purepascal instead of assembler.
Mike

Debugging with only the .exe

HI:
I've a Delphi 7 program that I wrote many years ago, but I've lost the source code. It's a small program but very useful for me.
I've tried to 'install' it again in a new Windows XP computer, just copying the folder with de data (.db paradox files), and configured the BDE connection.
When the programm starts I receive an "Unknown exception" and halts. I've no idea why this happens, and can't debug cause the lost source code. I've tried in another computer with the same results.
Any suggestions or ideas? What do you do in a situation like this?
Thanks in advance.
EDIT:
When I installed Delphi 7 in the new XP computer, the exception came from unknown to known. It was something related to the folder for the Paradox.net file. Thnk you all.
Delphi IDE can attach to a running process and debug it (Run -> Attach to process), although without debug symbols you will end up debugging plain assembler code, which requires some knowledge of assembler and how a Windows application works. And debugging startup exceptions could be pretty difficult if the debugger can't start the program. You can also use the WinDbg debugger from Microsoft.
There are disassemblers (I used the very powerful IDA Pro) that are able to recognize standard library calls helping analysys a lot. You may also find decompilers, although decompiling native applications is a bit more difficult than with those using a p-code or the like.
If the error is not due to a misconfiguration, patching a binary file is not easy.
You can use any debugger, either Visual Studio one, or a free OllyDbg, don't know if Delphi IDE have a simple external-exe-debugger.
But debugging will be very hard w/o source codes, and you must have at least basic knowledge of Assembler Language and win32api.
Alternatively you can use tools like FileMon & RegMon to examine your app activity and find potential problems.
You can try "Run|Connect to process..." in the Delphi IDE. But what zed_0xff said regarding debbugging without sources still applies.
I would go for the disassemble approach like ldsandon suggest, especially since you have (some) knowledge about what your exe is doing.
Besides IDA Pro also take a look at tools aimed specifically at Delphi such as IDR (Interactive Delphi Reconstructor), DeDe and PE Explorer.
To make sure it is not BDE related, I would build another rudimentary application trying to access the same data on this machine.
Once this application works, you can move on to test on the Pascal code side of things.
I have had my share of BDE oddities so I'd prefer to rule this out.

Resources