[FFmpeg-devel] Tracking down frame corrupting race conditions on Windows.

[Michael Niedermayer]

On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 01:49:13PM -0700, Dale Curtis wrote:
> All,
> 
> We've been running into an issue where the decoder (avcodec_decode_video2) is
> returning corrupted frames on Win32; some images showing the corruption:
> 
> http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=120396#c13
> 
> The problem is most easily detected when run under thread sanitizer (TSAN)* with
> a hash test.  I've created a sample program which simply decodes and hashes
> each frame (using the av_sha_* interfaces) to illustrate this:
> 
> Without TSAN and 2 threads:
> > hash-test.exe bear0.mp4 2
> 000: a1d99a1a3f6ec3ffbad916ad34e14a69b011ece10505930fea07f5a5cd988a7c
> <...>
> 081: d857354e53a1161e1be083e95e01ad7a12920c5307c37d012c8fa1d3fb784fc2
> 36be212f0080fe4e74a2187cad8f393fafecf5760f3e88e273fc59d683582ddf
> 
> With TSAN and 2 threads:
> > tsan\tsan.bat --log-file=tsan.txt -- hash-test.exe bear0.mp4 2
> 000: e5a0e89c28c8ade300ae572508aeab2f06b59e0da30a20abde926da4003dc680
> <...>
> 081: 85582db265d1f2ec90d32f5642075af81397c0de2d606defb3d704eeca261253
> 1c746db9b787908287662a302f74de852a682fcb3539abbc204a41671ae66161
> 
> With TSAN and 1 threads:
> > tsan\tsan.bat --log-file=tsan.txt -- hash-test.exe bear0.mp4 1
> 000: a1d99a1a3f6ec3ffbad916ad34e14a69b011ece10505930fea07f5a5cd988a7c
> <...>
> 081: d857354e53a1161e1be083e95e01ad7a12920c5307c37d012c8fa1d3fb784fc2
> 36be212f0080fe4e74a2187cad8f393fafecf5760f3e88e273fc59d683582ddf
> 
> Our assumption is that the output from threads == 1 should be indistinguishable
> from output with threads > 1.  Some general notes:
> 
>    - The issue occurs with at least h264, vp8, and theora files.
>    - We have seen no issues under Linux or Mac, which is not to say there are no
>      problems.  The Windows version of TSAN runs much slower than the Linux
>      or Mac variants and thus may be more susceptible to the issue.
>    - Switching to pthreads instead of using w32threads on Windows does not fix
>      the problem.
>    - Given the hash changes with the number of threads, we suspect the problem
>      is a race condition.
>    - It's possible TSAN is breaking something fundamental, however past
>      experience with the tool has shown the worst case to be false positives;
>      never spurious impacts to the running program...
>    - FATE will fail its hash tests on almost every single test if TSAN is set as
>      the target_exec on Windows.
> 
> To reproduce the results, the fastest way is to grab the test bundle from here:
> 
>    http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/dalecurtis-shared/hash-test.zip

I tried the video files under linux with and without tsan i tried it
under wine without tsan, all match
wine + tsan gives me
fixme:ntdll:FILE_CreateFile alloc_size not supported
so i dunno, is it possible to run windows tsan under wine ?


[...]
> acolwell and I have spent a lot of time trying to track down the source of this
> corruption on Windows without much success.  We're hoping the community might
> have some better ideas on where to look.  Thanks in advance for any assistance!

have you tried without asm (inline+yasm) ? (thats just a random idea,
unlikely to help)

[...]
-- 
Michael     GnuPG fingerprint: 9FF2128B147EF6730BADF133611EC787040B0FAB

In fact, the RIAA has been known to suggest that students drop out
of college or go to community college in order to be able to afford
settlements. -- The RIAA
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