[Openmcl-devel] CCL apps likely to crash on OS X Mountain Lion when including NSScrollView

Alexander Repenning alexander.repenning at Colorado.EDU
Thu Apr 25 17:30:49 PDT 2013


We have a very strange thing going on with NSScrollView on Mountain Lion. It is not clear if CCL is directly or indirectly causing this but the bottom line is that any CCL/Cocoa based application including  NSScrollViews (they are pretty handy) trying to run on Mountain Lion has a good chance of crashing. Took us a while to narrow some mysterious crashes down to this. To make things worse, this only seems to happen on about 50% of the machines we tested on. 

This is what happens. If you have a Mountain Lion machine with the following system preference: "Show scroll bars" to "Automatically based on mouse or trackpad" In this mode, any NSScrollView will only show scroll handles when the mouse is hovering over it. This behavior seems to be achieved, not surprisingly, through a timer. On SOME machines the moment you create an NSScrollView and set it frame this timer gets started and if about ~1 second later, if that NSScrollView is not ready for some update all hell breaks loose. On the trace below you can see:

 a call to [_NSScrollerStyleRecommender scrollerStyleRecommendationUpdateTimerFired:] resulting in a call to [NSScrollerImpPair _updateAllScrollerImpPairsForNewRecommendedScrollerStyle:] 

Of course these methods are not documented. A search and query on Stack overflow did not result in anything. Regular Xcode apps with NSScrollViews do not appear to exhibit this problem.

To reproduce you can run the code below. A window with a button will show up. Press the button. With 50% chance the crash will happen. Observations:

- no correlation to version of CCL (1.9, 32bit/64bit)
- no correlation to version of Mountain Lion 10.8.1, 10.8.2, 10.8.3. have all been observed to crash
- the crash either happens EVERY TIME you press the button or NEVER
- the crash never happens in CCL with a Listener present

The test code below just makes an instance of NSScrollView and calls initWithFrame. No view actually shows up. This is not super meaningful but has a high chance of causing the problem.  


Any idea what could cause this or better how how to stop this would be super helpful. Test source, link to test app and stack trace are below. The main question is why, on some machines, this timer would be started and how this could be correlated in CCL to have listener window, or not. Any ideas would be appreciated. 

best,  Alex



__________ Scroll-crash.lisp ___________


;; eval file in CCL  and then launch the app created

(in-package :gui)

(defun SHOW-TEST-WINDOW ()
  (let ((window (make-instance ns:ns-window          
                  :with-content-rect (ns:make-ns-rect 100 800 300 50)
                  :style-mask
                  (logior #$NSTitledWindowMask
                          #$NSClosableWindowMask
                          #$NSResizableWindowMask
                          #$NSMiniaturizableWindowMask)
                  :backing #$NSBackingStoreBuffered
                  :defer t))
        (content-view (#/initWithFrame: (#/alloc ns:ns-view) (ns:make-ns-rect 0 0 300 50)))
        (button (#/initWithFrame: (#/alloc ns:ns-button) (ns:make-ns-rect 0 0 300 50))))
    (#/setAction: button (objc::@selector #/nsButtonAction))
    (#/setTitle: button (ccl::%make-nsstring "Make NSScrollView"))
    (#/setContentView: window content-view)
    (#/addSubview: content-view button)
    (#/orderFront: window nil)))

(objc:defmethod (#/nsButtonAction :void) ((self ns:ns-button))
  (let ((scroll-view (make-instance 'ns:ns-scroll-view)))
    (ns:with-ns-rect (Frame 0 0 100 100)
      (#/initWithFrame: scroll-view Frame))))

(objc:defmethod (#/applicationDidFinishLaunching: :void)
                ((self lisp-application-delegate) notification)
  (declare (ignore notification))
  (show-test-window))
  
(objc:defmethod (#/applicationShouldOpenUntitledFile: #>BOOL)
                ((self lisp-application-delegate) app)
  ;; DO NOT SHOW LISTENR!
  (declare (ignore app))
  nil)

(progn 
  (require "build-application")
  (ccl::build-application :name "Scroll-CRASH"
			  :directory (format nil "~A/Desktop/" (user-homedir-pathname))))






_________ end ______________


For your replication convenience here is a ready to launch test app in CCL (~80MB): http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/temp/Scroll-CRASH.app


more info:




• The bug was initially showing up in AgentCubes and would cause a crash every time we brought up a window that contains an NSScrollView
• We tested it on 4 different mountain lion machines and the bug would occur on all of them when the  "Automatically based on mouse or trackpad" preference was set
• We have tried to reproduce the bug with just CCL but it never seems to occur inside of the CCL application
• We have found that we need to create an application which has no listener in order to reproduce the error (this is done in the test app)
• We eventually narrowed the bug down to a call to initWithFrame: if this is called on an NSScrollView, inside of an application which has no listener then the crash will happen if the preference is set
• We tried to run many other tests but most of them were related to our cocoa wrapper which turned out to be a dead end when we discovered the bug could be reproduce with only the cocoa class

Here is the stack trace:

4/24/13 3:10:57.761 PM Scroll-CRASH[1010]: *** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInternalInconsistencyException', reason: 'Invalid parameter not satisfying: scrollerImpPair == SCROLLER_IMP_PAIR'
*** Call stack at first throw:
(
	0   CoreFoundation                      0x99cbee9b __raiseError + 219
	1   libobjc.A.dylib                     0x90a6552e objc_exception_throw + 230
	2   CoreFoundation                      0x99c1e6a8 +[NSException raise:format:arguments:] + 136
	3   Foundation                          0x93dfb814 -[NSAssertionHandler handleFailureInMethod:object:file:lineNumber:description:] + 116
	4   AppKit                              0x977cd7ab -[NSScrollView(NSPrivate) scrollerImpPair:updateScrollerStyleForNewRecommendedScrollerStyle:] + 150
	5   AppKit                              0x977cd6a5 +[NSScrollerImpPair _updateAllScrollerImpPairsForNewRecommendedScrollerStyle:] + 406
	6   AppKit                              0x977cd4ff +[NSScrollerImpPair _scrollerStyleRecommendationChanged:] + 159
	7   Foundation                          0x93e52152 __57-[NSNotificationCenter addObserver:selector:name:object:]_block_invoke_0 + 49
	8   CoreFoundation                      0x99c80861 ___CFXNotificationPost_block_invoke_0 + 257
	9   CoreFoundation                      0x99bcbe9a _CFXNotificationPost + 2794
	10  Foundation                          0x93e3ac88 -[NSNotificationCenter postNotificationName:object:userInfo:] + 92
	11  AppKit                              0x977cd3f5 -[_NSScrollerStyleRecommender setRecommendedScrollerStyleAndNotify:] + 248
	12  AppKit                              0x977cd2e3 __75-[_NSScrollerStyleRecommender scrollerStyleRecommendationUpdateTimerFired:]_block_invoke_0 + 43
	13  AppKit                              0x97eff42f __block_global_0 + 32
	14  libdispatch.dylib                   0x98f10f8f _dispatch_call_block_and_release + 15
	15  libdispatch.dylib                   0x98f0cc82 _dispatch_client_callout + 46
	16  libdispatch.dylib                   0x98f122e3 _dispatch_main_queue_callback_4CF + 223
	17  CoreFoundation                      0x99bbac39 __CFRunLoopRun + 1961
	18  CoreFoundation                      0x99bba02a CFRunLoopRunSpecific + 378
	19  CoreFoundation                      0x99bb9e9b CFRunLoopRunInMode + 123
	20  HIToolbox                           0x91e16f5a RunCurrentEventLoopInMode + 242
	21  HIToolbox                           0x91e16cc9 ReceiveNextEventCommon + 374
	22  HIToolbox                           0x91e16b44 BlockUntilNextEventMatchingListInMode + 88
	23  AppKit                              0x976e99aa _DPSNextEvent + 724
	24  AppKit                              0x976e91dc -[NSApplication nextEventMatchingMask:untilDate:inMode:dequeue:] + 119
	25  AppKit                              0x976df63c -[NSApplication run] + 855
	26  Scroll-CRASH                        0x000198f5 SPffcall + 85
	27  ???                                 0x003cbfb0 0x0 + 3981232

	
28  ???                                 0x003cbfb0 0x0 + 3981232
	29  Scroll-CRASH                        0x00019f51 func_start + 94
	30  Scroll-CRASH                        0x0001c75e main + 910
	31  Scroll-CRASH                        0x0002fa51 _start + 208
	32  Scroll-CRASH                        0x0002f980 start + 40
	33  ???                                 0x00000002 0x0 + 2


Prof. Alexander Repenning

University of Colorado
Computer Science Department
Boulder, CO 80309-430

vCard: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/AlexanderRepenning.vcf





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