There is an article on MSDN talking about QueryPerformanceCounter:
Acquiring high-resolution time stamps
Towards the bottom is an FAQ section with an interesting question:
Under what circumstances does QueryPerformanceFrequency return FALSE, or QueryPerformanceCounter return zero?
This won't occur on any system that runs Windows XP or later.
That answer is correct, except that it is wrong. There are circumstances where QueryPerformanceFrequency will return false.
I will be self answering this.
Under what circumstances does QueryPerformanceFrequency return FALSE, or QueryPerformanceCounter return zero?
This won't occur on any system that runs Windows XP or later.
That is correct, perhaps with the slight change in phrasing:
This can occur on any system that runs Windows XP or later.
There are circumstances where QueryPerformanceFrequency returns false. You can Google for people experiencing the problem.
i had the problem today (on Windows 7):
Int64 freq;
//...
QueryPerformanceFrequency(#freq);
The function call fails (returns false), and GetLastError returns:
ERROR_NOACCESS
998 (0x3E6)
Invalid access to memory location.
Alignment Matters
The issue happens if your Int64 memory address is not double-word (4-byte) aligned. For example, if you use a compiler that defaults to Byte or Word alignment for objects, or structures, or class member variables. In this case, QueryPerformanceCounter will return false.
Note: It's entirely possible that QueryPerformanceCounter only happens to work with double-word (4-byte) alignment, and might actually require quad-word (8-byte) alignment. The Windows x64 calling convention documentation is silent on the subject.
It is also possible that the CPU hardware is silently fixing up 4-byte alignment to 8-byte alignment, where it won't do the same for 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, or 7 byte alignment. It is also possible that this new drive system, if operable, could render the Red October undetectable to our SOSUS warning nets in the Atlantic.
tl;dr
Under what circumstances does QueryPerformanceFrequency return FALSE, or QueryPerformanceCounter return zero?
The function can fail with error code ERROR_NOACCESS (Invalid access to memory location) if the variable to not double-word (8-byte) aligned.
Bonus Chatter
The documentation:
Return value
If the installed hardware supports a high-resolution performance counter, the return value is nonzero.
If the function fails, the return value is zero. To get extended error information, call GetLastError. On systems that run Windows XP or later, the function will always succeed and will thus never return zero.
Related
Basically, this is the same question that was asked here.
When performing kernel debugging of a machine running Windows 7 or older, with WinDbg version 6.2 and up, the debugger doesn't show anything in the registers window. Pressing the Customize... button results in a message box that reads Registers are not yet known.
At the same time, issuing the r command results in perfectly valid register values being printed out.
What is the reason for this behaviour, and can it be fixed?
TL;DR: I wrote an extension DLL that fixes the bug. Available here.
The Problem
To understand the problem, we first need to understand that WinDbg is basically just a frontend to Microsoft's Windows Symbolic Debugger Engine, implemented inside dbgeng.dll. Other frontends include the command-line kd.exe (kernel debugger) and cdb.exe (user-mode debugger).
The engine implements everything we expect from a debugger: working with symbol files, read and writing memory and registers, setting breakpoitns, etc. The engine then exposes all of this functionality through COM-like interfaces (they implement IUnknown but are not registered components). This allows us, for instance, to write our own debugger (like this person did).
Armed with this knowledge, we can now make an educated guess as to how WinDbg obtains the values of the registers on the target machine.
The engine exposes the IDebugRegisters interface for manipulating registers. This interface declares the GetValues method for retrieving the values of multiple registers in one go. But how does WinDbg know how many registers are there? That why we have the GetNumberRegisters method.
So, to retrieve the values of all registers on the target, we'll have to do something like this:
Call IDebugRegisters::GetNumberRegisters to get the total number of registers.
Call IDebugRegisters::GetValues with the Count parameter set to the total number of registers, the Indices parameter set to NULL, and the Start parameter set to 0.
One tiny problem, though: the second call fails with E_INVALIDARG.
Ehm, excuse me? How can it fail? Especially puzzling is the documentation for this return value:
The value of the index of one of the registers is greater than the number of registers on the target machine.
But I just asked you how many registers there are, so how can that value be out of range? Okay, let's continue reading the docs anyway, maybe something will become clear:
If the return value is not S_OK, some of the registers still might have been read. If the target was not accessible, the return type is E_UNEXPECTED and Values is unchanged; otherwise, Values will contain partial results and the registers that could not be read will have type DEBUG_VALUE_INVALID.
(Emphasis mine.)
Aha! So maybe the engine just couldn't read one of the registers! But which one? Turns out that the engine chokes on the xcr0 register. From the Intel 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer’s Manual:
Extended control register XCR0 contains a state-component bitmap that specifies the user state components that software has enabled the XSAVE feature set to manage. If the bit corresponding to a state component is clear in XCR0, instructions in the XSAVE feature set will not operate on that state component, regardless of the value of the instruction mask.
Okay, so the register controls the operation of the XSAVE instruction, which saves the state of the CPU's extended features (like XMM and AVX). According to the last comment on this page, this instruction requires some support from the operating system. Although the comment states that Windows 7 (that's what the VM I was testing on was running) does support this instruction, it seems that the issue at hand is related to the OS anyway, as when the target is Windows 8 everything works fine.
Really, it's unclear whether the bug is within the debugger engine, which reports more registers than it can retrieve values for, or within WinDbg, which refuses to show any values at all if the engine fails to produce all of them.
The Solution
We could, of course, bite the bullet and just use an older version of WinDbg for debugging older Windows versions. But where's the challenge in that?
Instead, I present to you a debugger extension that solves this problem. It does so by hooking (with the help of this library) the relevant debugger engine methods and returning S_OK if the only register that failed was xcr0. Otherwise, it propagates the failure. The extension supports runtime unload, so if you experience problems you can always disable the hooks.
That's it, have fun!
We have an older massive C++ application and we have been converting it to support Unicode as well as 64-bits. The following strange thing has been happening:
Calls to registry functions and windows creation functions, like the following, have been failing:
hWnd = CreateSysWindowExW( ExStyle, ClassNameW.StringW(), Label2.StringW(), Style,
Posn.X(), Posn.Y(),
Size.X(), Size.Y(),
hParentWnd, (HMENU)Id,
AppInstance(), NULL);
ClassNameW and Label2 are instances of our own Text class which essentially uses malloc to allocate the memory used to store the string.
Anyway, when the functions fail, and I call GetLastError it returns the error code for "invalid memory access" (though I can inspect and see the string arguments fine in the debugger). Yet if I change the code as follows then it works perfectly fine:
BSTR Label2S = SysAllocString(Label2.StringW());
BSTR ClassNameWS = SysAllocString(ClassNameW.StringW());
hWnd = CreateSysWindowExW( ExStyle, ClassNameWS, Label2S, Style,
Posn.X(), Posn.Y(),
Size.X(), Size.Y(),
hParentWnd, (HMENU)Id,
AppInstance(), NULL);
SysFreeString(ClassNameWS); ClassNameWS = 0;
SysFreeString(Label2S); Label2S = 0;
So what gives? Why would the original functions work fine with the arguments in local memory, but when used with Unicode, the registry function require SysAllocString, and when used in 64-bit, the Windows creation functions also require SysAllocString'd string arguments? Our Windows procedure functions have all been converted to be Unicode, always, and yes we use SetWindowLogW call the correct default Unicode DefWindowProcW etc. That all seems to work fine and handles and draws Unicode properly etc.
The documentation at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms632679%28v=vs.85%29.aspx does not say anything about this. While our application is massive we do use debug heaps and tools like Purify to check for and clean up any memory corruption. Also at the time of this failure, there is still only one main system thread. So it is not a thread issue.
So what is going on? I have read that if string arguments are marshalled anywhere or passed across process boundaries, then you have to use SysAllocString/BSTR, yet we call lots of API functions and there is lots of code out there which calls these functions just using plain local strings?
What am I missing? I have tried Googling this, as someone else must have run into this, but with little luck.
Edit 1: Our StringW function does not create any temporary objects which might go out of scope before the actual API call. The function is as follows:
Class Text {
const wchar_t* StringW () const
{
return TextStartW;
}
wchar_t* TextStartW; // pointer to current start of text in DataArea
I have been running our application with the debug heap and memory checking and other diagnostic tools, and found no source of memory corruption, and looking at the assembly, there is no sign of temporary objects or invalid memory access.
BUT I finally figured it out:
We compile our code /Zp1, which means byte aligned memory allocations. SysAllocString (in 64-bits) always return a pointer that is aligned on a 8 byte boundary. Presumably a 32-bit ANSI C++ application goes through an API layer to the underlying Unicode windows DLLs, which would also align the pointer for you.
But if you use Unicode, you do not get that incidental pointer alignment that the conversion mapping layer gives you, and if you use 64-bits, of course the situation will get even worse.
I added a method to our Text class which shifts the string pointer so that it is aligned on an eight byte boundary, and viola, everything runs fine!!!
Of course the Microsoft people say it must be memory corruption and I am jumping the wrong conclusion, but there is evidence it is not the case.
Also, if you use /Zp1 and include windows.h in a 64-bit application, the debugger will tell you sizeof(BITMAP)==28, but calling GetObject on a bitmap will fail and tell you it needs a 32-byte structure. So I suspect that some of Microsoft's API is inherently dependent on aligned pointers, and I also know that some optimized assembly (I have seen some from Fortran compilers) takes advantage of that and crashes badly if you ever give it unaligned pointers.
So the moral of all of this is, dont use "funky" compiler arguments like /Zp1. In our case we have to for historical reasons, but the number of times this has bitten us...
Someone please give me a "this is useful" tick on my answer please?
Using a bit of psychic debugging, I'm going to guess that the strings in your application are pooled in a read-only section.
It's possible that the CreateSysWindowsEx is attempting to write to the memory passed in for the window class or title. That would explain why the calls work when allocated on the heap (SysAllocString) but not when used as constants.
The easiest way to investigate this is to use a low level debugger like windbg - it should break into the debugger at the point where the access violation occurs which should help figure out the problem. Don't use Visual Studio, it has a nasty habit of being helpful and hiding first chance exceptions.
Another thing to try is to enable appverifier on your application - it's possible that it may show something.
Calling a Windows API function does not cross the process boundary, since the various Windows DLLs are loaded into your process.
It sounds like whatever pointer that StringW() is returning isn't valid when Windows is trying to access it. I would look there - is it possible that the pointer returned it out of scope and deleted shortly after it is called?
If you share some more details about your string class, that could help diagnose the problem here.
I have a long standing program with the FAA that was running great until the FAA started deploying Dell GX-760 desktops. The program is a graphical replay of air traffic. I use the QueryPerformanceFrequency function to get the processor counter. With the GX 760 it appears to not be processor dependent. I found this http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms644904(VS.85).aspx which descibes what I am seeing.
On a multiprocessor computer, it
should not matter which processor is
called. However, youit can get
different results on different
processors due to bugs in the basic
input/output system (BIOS) or the
hardware abstraction layer (HAL). To
specify processor affinity for a
thread, use the SetThreadAffinityMask
function.
I not familiar with SetThreadAffinityMask, how does this work and how should I implement it? Here is my code that gets the count.
Thanks,
Dave
'Declarations
Private Declare Function QueryPerformanceCounter Lib "kernel32" (lpPerformanceCount As Currency) As Long
Private Declare Function QueryPerformanceFrequency Lib "kernel32" (lpFrequency As Currency) As Long
'I set the Frequency on Startup
cTime.SetFrequency
Public Sub SetFrequency()
'Get the Processor Frequency. This is locked at Windows startup and does n
Dim f As Currency
QueryPerformanceFrequency f
cTime.Frequency = f
End Sub
When the program needs the time it calls
Public Function CurrentCount() As Currency
'What is the current processoer count
QueryPerformanceCounter CurrentCount 'get current count number
End Function
It isn't exactly clear what kind of problem you are having. It is very unlikely that the quoted MSDN article is relevant, a Dell Optiplex 760 doesn't have multiple processors. Just one with multiple cores, it is not subject to this kind of bug. You can easily test this by running your program with the start.exe, it allows setting the processor affinity:
start /affinity 1 yourapp.exe
Perhaps more relevant is that newer machines take shortcuts on the frequency source, using whatever source happens to be available in the chipset. They typically have a much higher return value for QueryPerformanceFrequency. Two billion isn't unusual, maybe that screws up your math. Working with 'currency' instead of a true 64-bit integer is rather toe-curling.
Also check the BIOS revision for your machine, they had rather a large number of them, all the way up to A08.
Operating System: Windows XP 64 bit, SP2.
I have an unusual problem. I am porting some code from 32 bit to 64 bit. The 32 bit code works just fine. But when I call CreateThread() for the 64 bit version the call fails. I have three places where this fails. 2 call CreateThread(). 1 calls beginthreadex() which calls CreateThread().
All three calls fail with error code 0x3E6, "Invalid access to memory location".
The problem is all the input parameters are correct.
HANDLE h;
DWORD threadID;
h = CreateThread(0, // default security
0, // default stack size
myThreadFunc, // valid function to call
myParam, // my param
0, // no flags, start thread immediately
&threadID);
All three calls to CreateThread() are made from a DLL I've injected into the target program at the start of the program execution (this is before the program has got to the start of main()/WinMain()). If I call CreateThread() from the target program (same params) via say a menu, it works. Same parameters etc. Bizarre.
If I pass NULL instead of &threadID, it still fails.
If I pass NULL as myParam, it still fails.
I'm not calling CreateThread from inside DllMain(), so that isn't the problem. I'm confused and searching on Google etc hasn't shown any relevant answers.
If anyone has seen this before or has any ideas, please let me know.
Thanks for reading.
ANSWER
Short answer: Stack Frames on x64 need to be 16 byte aligned.
Longer answer:
After much banging my head against the debugger wall and posting responses to the various suggestions (all of which helped in someway, prodding me to try new directions) I started exploring what-ifs about what was on the stack prior to calling CreateThread(). This proved to be a red-herring but it did lead to the solution.
Adding extra data to the stack changes the stack frame alignment. Sooner or later one of the tests gets you to 16 byte stack frame alignment. At that point the code worked. So I retraced my steps and started putting NULL data onto the stack rather than what I thought was the correct values (I had been pushing return addresses to fake up a call frame). It still worked - so the data isn't important, it must be the actual stack addresses.
I quickly realised it was 16 byte alignment for the stack. Previously I was only aware of 8 byte alignment for data. This microsoft document explains all the alignment requirements.
If the stackframe is not 16 byte aligned on x64 the compiler may put large (8 byte or more) data on the wrong alignment boundaries when it pushes data onto the stack.
Hence the problem I faced - the hooking code was called with a stack that was not aligned on a 16 byte boundary.
Quick summary of alignment requirements, expressed as size : alignment
1 : 1
2 : 2
4 : 4
8 : 8
10 : 16
16 : 16
Anything larger than 8 bytes is aligned on the next power of 2 boundary.
I think Microsoft's error code is a bit misleading. The initial STATUS_DATATYPE_MISALIGNMENT could be expressed as a STATUS_STACK_MISALIGNMENT which would be more helpful. But then turning STATUS_DATATYPE_MISALIGNMENT into ERROR_NOACCESS - that actually disguises and misleads as to what the problem is. Very unhelpful.
Thank you to everyone that posted suggestions. Even if I disagreed with the suggestions, they prompted me to test in a wide variety of directions (including the ones I disagreed with).
Written a more detailed description of the problem of datatype misalignment here: 64 bit porting gotcha #1! x64 Datatype misalignment.
The only reason that 64bit would make a difference is that threading on 64bit requires 64bit aligned values. If threadID isn't 64bit aligned, you could cause this problem.
Ok, that idea's not it. Are you sure it's valid to call CreateThread before main/WinMain? It would explain why it works in a menu- because that's after main/WinMain.
In addition, I'd triple-check the lifetime of myParam. CreateThread returns (this I know from experience) long before the function you pass in is called.
Post the thread routine's code (or just a few lines).
It suddenly occurs to me: Are you sure that you're injecting your 64bit code into a 64bit process? Because if you had a 64bit CreateThread call and tried to inject that into a 32bit process running under WOW64, bad things could happen.
Starting to seriously run out of ideas. Does the compiler report any warnings?
Could the bug be due to a bug in the host program, rather than the DLL? There's some other code, such as loading a DLL if you used __declspec(import/export), that occurs before main/WinMain. If that DLLMain, for example, had a bug in it.
I ran into this issue today. And I checked every argument feed into _beginthread/CreateThread/NtCreateThread via rohitab's Windows API Monitor v2. Every argument is aligned properly (AFAIK).
So, where does STATUS_DATATYPE_MISALIGNMENT come from?
The first few lines of NtCreateThread validate parameters passed from user mode.
ProbeForReadSmallStructure (ThreadContext, sizeof (CONTEXT), CONTEXT_ALIGN);
for i386
#define CONTEXT_ALIGN (sizeof(ULONG))
for amd64
#define STACK_ALIGN (16UI64)
...
#define CONTEXT_ALIGN STACK_ALIGN
On amd64, if the ThreadContext pointer is not aligned to 16 bytes, NtCreateThread will return STATUS_DATATYPE_MISALIGNMENT.
CreateThread (actually CreateRemoteThread) allocated ThreadContext from stack, and did nothing special to guarantee the alignment requirement is satisfied. Things will work smoothly if every piece of your code followed Microsoft x64 calling convention, which unfortunately not true for me.
PS: The same code may work on newer Windows (say Vista and newer). I didn't check though. I'm facing this issue on Windows Server 2003 R2 x64.
I'm in the business of using parallel threads under windows
for calculations. No funny business, no dll-calls, and certainly
no call-back's. The following works in 32 bits windows. I set up the stack for my calculation, well within the area reserved for my program.
All releveant data about area's and start addresses is contained in
a data structure that is passed to CreateThread as parameter 3.
The address that is called contains a small assembler routine
that uses this data stucture.
Indeed this routine finds the address to return to on the stack,
then the address of the data structure.
There is no reason to go far into this. It just works and it calculates
the number of primes below 2,000,000,000 just fine, in one thread,
in two threads or in 20 threads.
Now CreateThread in 64 bits doesn't push the address of the data
structure. That seems implausible so I show you the smoking gun,
a dump of a debug session.
In the subwindow at the bottom right you see the stack, and
there is merely the return address, amidst a sea of zeroes.
The mechanism I use to fill in parameters is portable between 32 and 64 bits.
No other call exhibits a difference between word-sizes.
Moreover why would the code address work but not the data address?
The bottom line: one would expect that CreateThread passes the data parameter on the stack in the same way in 64 bits as in 32 bits, then does a subroutine call. At the assembler level it doesn't work that way. If there are any hidden requirements to e.g. RSP that are automatically fullfilled in C++ that would be very nasty.
P.S. No there are no 16 byte alignment problems. That lies ages behind me.
Try using _beginthread() or _beginthreadex() instead, you shouldn't be using CreateThread directly.
See this previous question.
It is possible to propagate in already opened application the value(environment variables of Windows) of a variable of Windows after its creation or its modification without having to restart the applications which turn?
How to?
Perhaps, using server fault to post a such question would be better?
Something like SendMessage(HWND_BROADCAST,WM_SETTINGCHANGE,0,TEXT("Environment")) is your best bet, but most applications will ignore it, but Explorer should handle it. (Allow applications to pick up updates)
If you want to go into crazy undocumented land, you could use WriteProcessMemory and update the environment block in every process you have access to.
Yes, this is possible.
Method
It is involved though. I'll outline the basic steps. The detail for each step is documented in many places on the web, including Stack Overflow.
Create a helper dll. The dll does nothing except set the environment variables you want to set. It can do this from DllMain without causing any problems. Just don't got mad with other function calls from inside DllMain. How you communicate to the DLL what variables to set and what values to set them is left for you to decide (read a file, read from registry...)
Enumerate all processes that you wish to update (toolhelp32 will help with this).
For each process you wish to update, inject your helper dll. CreateRemoteThread() will help with this. This will fail for 2% of all apps on NT 4, rising to 5% on XP. Most likely higher percentage failures for Vista/7 and the server versions.
Things you have to live with:
If you are running a 32 bit process on a 64 bit OS, CreateRemoteThread will fail to inject your DLL into 32 bit apps 100% of the time (and cannot inject into 64 bit apps anyway as that is a job for a 64 bit app).
EDIT: Turns out 100% isn't correct. But it is very hit and miss. Don't rely on it.
Don't remain resident
If you don't want your helper DLL to remain resident in the target application, return FALSE for the DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH notification.
BOOL APIENTRY DllMain(HANDLE hModule,
DWORD ul_reason_for_call,
LPVOID lpReserved)
{
if (ul_reason_for_call == DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH)
{
// set our env vars here
SetEnvironmentVariable("weebles", "wobble but they don't fall down");
// we don't want to remain resident, our work is done
return FALSE;
}
return TRUE;
}
No, I'm pretty sure that's not possible.