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It's good to know I'm not crazy

Going through my weekly backlog of email, I found a crash report on this assembly code:

004e19f3: 0f73d430        psrlq  mm4, 30h
004e19f7: 0f7ee0          movd   eax, mm4
004e19fa: 0fe504c5d89f5c  pmulhw mm0, [eax*8+005c9fd8]      <-- FAULT
          00

This is the division approximation code for the temporal smoother filter in VirtualDub. It essentially computes:

result.rgb = color.rgb * div_table[sum >> 48];

The crash was an access violation, indicating a bad pointer. Problem number one is that, the way the code's structured, the table index never exceeds 128. Problem number two:

EAX = 00800000

Extracting the top 16 bits of a 64-bit unsigned quantity gave a value bigger than 0x10000. That's... not possible.

I couldn't figure out how this could happen, so I wrote back the user asking if the crash was reproducible. As it turned out, he'd already diagnosed the problem: bad RAM. My guess is that the OS had done a context switch in the middle of these instructions, giving the opportunity for EAX to be dumped to memory and be corrupted. Sometimes the impossible does actually happen... well, at least when hardware failure is involved.

Comments

This blog was originally open for comments when this entry was first posted, but was later closed and then removed due to spam and after a migration away from the original blog software. Unfortunately, it would have been a lot of work to reformat the comments to republish them. The author thanks everyone who posted comments and added to the discussion.