Client Errors of S5R2/S5R3 Apps

Exit code -1073741819 (0xC0000005): This is the famous "General Access Violation". There a numerous reasons for this error to occur, from hardware problems to graphics drivers and more. Ideally when this happens, the "Windows Runtime Debugger" should start up and write a stack dump to stderr out that helps to further diagnose the problem. If the "Access Violation" is listed in the "*** Dump of the Graphics thread ***", it was almost certainly a problem with the graphics driver. The most common cause for an Access Violation listed in the "*** Dump of the Worker thread ***" shows "houghmap.c:" near the end of the first line of the Callstack. This is a problem that we might be able to do something about, we are currently hunting this. Apparently it only happens on certain machines, it might be related to the data these hosts are processing, but may also be a property of the hardware or other software on the system.

Exit code 10: It means that the App could not resume from a previously written checkpoint. Again, the output listed in stderr out of the result should give a hint why. Most of the errors we get of this type are apparently due to a broken harddisk sector or even filesystems (e.g. some have the checkpoint file point to what looks like a portion of the client_state.xml). Again there's one error of this type we are trying to understand better in order to do something about it: It's an empty checkpoint file, in which case there will be an "EOF encountered" listed at the bottom of stderr out.

Exit code 99: This means that the App terminated because an internal check failed. Again there should be something at the end of stderr out that allows to further diagnose the problem. If stderr out lists "file SFTfileIO.c" at the bottom, the check that failed was a sanity check of the data read from the input files. Resetting the project and thus downloading a fresh set of data files might help. Again, there is one type of error we are working on to better understand what's happening in order to prevent this from happening again: In these cases the following lines are shown at the bottom of stderr out:
[CRITICAL]: Required frequency-bins [-8, 8] not covered by SFT-interval [...]
XLAL Error - LocalXLALComputeFaFb (LocalComputeFstat.c:536): Input domain error

Exit code -1073741502 (0xC0000142): It means that a DLL failed to load properly. This error looks like it's happening more frequently on Windows Vista, but we also get it from machines running Windows XP. We would greatly appreciate any idea which DLL this might be - so far I haven't got a clue (I could try to delay-load a specific DLL, but again for this I would need a "suspect").

Exit codes -1,0,1: These look like a program other than the BOINC Client (such as a malware scanner) terminated the App in the middle of crunching. The stderr out doesn't show anything helpful in these cases. Again, I (and probably a lot of participants) would be thankful for a hint why these are happening.

A word on BOINC Client versions: The "Windows Runtime Debugger" is only available with newer Clients (5.6 & up I think). The newest BOINC Client 5.10 has the bad habit of reporting only the "head" of the stderr output, which means that in many cases the useful diagnostic output is cut off. Earlier Clients (such as the 5.8 series) reported the last lines of stderr out, which made sure that the useful information that is at the bottom of the output doesn't get lost. So if you want to help us to track and fix the problems, I recommend using a 5.8 BOINC Core Client.

BM