PI 1.8 RC5 crash on Darkstructure Enhance

[Christoph Puetz]

Dear PI Community,

I loaded some (RGB-) pictures from Hubble Legacy Archive and processed them im PI 1.8 RC5
under Windows 7 Professional x64.

As an example you can take the M66 image
"NGC3627 (color) WFPC2 F814W/F555W WFALL-FIX 06549_01"

Independantly from the loaded image this PI version crashes if I start
Scripts->Dark Structure Enhance. You can use the default values for reproduction.

Are there any "dump files" that could be helpful for finding the error and how to upload
them ? If so, where are they stored under windows 7 ??


Only Information I have is from eventlog:

- System

  - Provider

   [ Name]  Application Error
 
  - EventID 1000

   [ Qualifiers]  0
 
   Level 2
 
   Task 100
 
   Keywords 0x80000000000000
 
  - TimeCreated

   [ SystemTime]  2013-03-29T19:20:32.000000000Z
 
   EventRecordID 110582
 
   Channel Application
 
   Computer cp-PC-win7-64
 
   Security
 

- EventData

   PixInsight.exe
   1.8.0.997
   5152d1ab
   unknown
   0.0.0.0
   00000000
   c0000005
   0000000000000000
   978
   01ce2cad64a47bf5
   C:\Program Files\PixInsight\bin\PixInsight.exe
   unknown
   b93b6daf-98a5-11e2-8069-bdd526313add

[Juan Conejero]

Hi Christoph,

I have reproduced a similar problem on Windows 7. What I have got is a BEX64 / StackHash problem. This is related to DEP (Data Execution Prevention), and is a ** Windows problem **, not a PixInsight problem, although obviously you as a user won't agree with this view. I can guarantee you that neither PixInsight nor any of the modules executed by PixInsight attempt to execute any code in a data segment of memory.

Fortunately, this only happens with the DarkStructureEnhance script. I say 'fortunately' because this script is a very special case. It depends on some very old tools that have been deprecated long time ago (in particular, the ATrousWaveletTransformV1 tool). Due to these dependencies, and to the fact that it has not been updated for years, this script is actually 'abandonware' in the PixInsight platform. We may consider removing it from future PI releases.

Nevertheless, the script works without problems on Linux and Mac OS X. I currently have no workaround or solution for Windows, since the BEX64/StackHash issue is very difficult to fix for a 64-bit application (because Windows does not allow to change DEP settings for x64 applications). I'll keep investigating this issue, but for now, if you really need to apply the DSE script, my advice is to use Linux or Mac OS X, if possible.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

[Christoph Puetz]

Dear Juan,

thanks for your reply.
As I am also a software developer I clearly understand this issue.
So I will setup a VirtualBox with PI running under Linux inside ;-)
or I will switch to Linux back again (as this is my favourite OS).
Simply had to switch to Win 7 for other purposes ....

[Juan Conejero]

Hi Christoph,

I have good news: I have managed to find the cause of this issue:

http://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=5394.msg37419#msg37419

I'll fix it next week. In the meanwhile, here is a workaround to prevent the crash:

1. Download the zipped file that I have attached to this post.

2. Uncompress the file to a local folder. It is a modified version of the DSE script.

3. When you run this modified script, make sure that the "Extract mask" option is enabled (it is enabled by default).

Let me know if it works.

[Christoph Puetz]

Hi Juan,

congratulations !  8)
I replaced the script with your version and tried again.
I also checked iterations up to 10.

It works fine - no more problems with DSE.
Thanks a lot.

Christoph

[Jan]

Awsome, it works! Juan you have my deep respect, your support is excellent, THANK YOU!

[Christoph Puetz]

... is also fixed in RC6 !