Help to reproduce "print" and "closing files" crashes

Mikael Nordvall

At our architects office we are using the 32-bit version of Ubuntu 12.04.5 with amd a-series apu:s and the amd catalyst proprietary display driver.
We have been using BricsCAD since the start of the office and are generally very satisfied with the software.

Right now we are unfortunately experiencing crashes with BricsCAD v15 that was not present with v14. Regularly (at least once every day on every architects workstation at our office) the application will crash when we are printing or when we are closing an open file (and possibly answering no to the question about saving the file).

I try to participate regularly in beta-testing and pinning down issues with new software versions and normally I do not post at all regarding support requests in the forum. But since these issues happens very randomly and nor I or the dev team has been able to reproduced and isolate the cause for a few weeks I think it is motivated to ask for help from the community.

Has anybody else experienced this and can you help in reproducing/isolating the issue?
If you are not experiencing this its also good to know. That might mean it is something with our system configs at the office.

Setting 'renderusinghardware' to '0' makes no improvement, nor does shifting from the proprietary AMD display driver to the open source radeon driver, so it does not seem to be related to the display driver (or Redway 3D-engine).
This also indicates that the gpu or display driver is not likely the cause. I have not been able to test on an Intel or Nvidia gpu though.

As I said we are running the 32b-bit version of Ubuntu 12.04.5. Anyone who is not experiencing these issues are very welcome to share their if they are running 32 or 64-bit versions and what Linux distribution and release you are running.

Thanks for helping us out!
//Mikael
www.openstudio.se

Tijs Vermeulen

Hello Mikael,

recently we have received a few support requests (by two users I think) reporting random crashes in BricsCAD (Mac).

After a lot of searching I spotted and fixed two potential crashes.

- crash by pending event
  I found one way to always reproduce a crash:

1. open two scratch documents
2. click to start a selection rectangle
3. while the rectangle is still visible, close the current document
   

  This issue is fixed by sending a cancel command before closing a document.
  This is a silly, easy to avoid scenario, but I think the fix applies to other potential crashes.
  This issue has been fixed in BricsCAD(Mac) V15.3.07.
  The same crash happens in BricsCAD(Linux) V15.2.  The same fix is expected to apply in the upcoming V15.3 for linux

- crash by wxClientDC destruction

  The other potential crash on BricsCAD(Mac) is related to our usage of the wxWidgets class wxClientDC.
  The wxwidgets docs mention about wxClientDC:
  "This should normally be constructed as a temporary stack object; don't store a wxClientDC object."
  We did store the wxClientDC of our main opengl window in some cases.
  In a wxClientDC a cgcontext is stored/restored on construction/destruction.
  On BricsCAD(Mac), when a per-document wxClientDC of the main ogl window is destroyed, the cgcontext that is restored can be out of date and trigger a crash when the restore is attempted.
  This issue is most likely also fixed in BricsCAD(Mac) V15.3.07.
  I say most likely since the issue could never be reproduced consistently, thus I also am not sure whether it is relevant on linux.

These two hard-to-spot crashes delayed publishing BricsCAD(Mac) V15.3.07 somewhat.
Now that V15.3.07 has been published, we can focus on the V15.3 beta for linux.

I noticed your open support request about this now, I was not aware of it.  I see my colleague working on that support request could never reproduce.  I will continue communication there.

Kind Regards
Tijs

Brian Marr

@Mikael Nordvall:

At our architects office we are using the 32-bit version of Ubuntu 12.04.5 with amd a-series apu:s and the amd catalyst proprietary display driver.
We have been using BricsCAD since the start of the office and are generally very satisfied with the software.

Right now we are unfortunately experiencing crashes with BricsCAD v15 that was not present with v14. Regularly (at least once every day on every architects workstation at our office) the application will crash when we are printing or when we are closing an open file (and possibly answering no to the question about saving the file).

I try to participate regularly in beta-testing and pinning down issues with new software versions and normally I do not post at all regarding support requests in the forum. But since these issues happens very randomly and nor I or the dev team has been able to reproduced and isolate the cause for a few weeks I think it is motivated to ask for help from the community.

Has anybody else experienced this and can you help in reproducing/isolating the issue?
If you are not experiencing this its also good to know. That might mean it is something with our system configs at the office.

Setting 'renderusinghardware' to '0' makes no improvement, nor does shifting from the proprietary AMD display driver to the open source radeon driver, so it does not seem to be related to the display driver (or Redway 3D-engine).
This also indicates that the gpu or display driver is not likely the cause. I have not been able to test on an Intel or Nvidia gpu though.

As I said we are running the 32b-bit version of Ubuntu 12.04.5. Anyone who is not experiencing these issues are very welcome to share their if they are running 32 or 64-bit versions and what Linux distribution and release you are running.

Thanks for helping us out!
//Mikael
www.openstudio.se

Yes I have come across a similar problem on this OpenSuse 13.2 Platform.
Currently using Version 15.2.11 (x64) revision 39473. When I close a file using the close tab button - Bricscad will crash. Closing the file using the menu - this does not occur. The file closes normally.  An earlier version - possibly 15.2.04-1, was particularly bad. It crashed on any file closure.

By the way 15.2.11 is turning into a great platform for mechanical drafting. The Ribbon has improved a lot. Assemblies are within our grasp now. They have become more accessible on the Ribbon and work reliably. Thanks to the developers.

Mikael Nordvall

Thanks for the quick replies.
Seems like you have the issue pinned down Tijs. I guess Brians statement that he can avoid this bug by closing using '/File/Close' also makes it even more likely that this is the wxwidgets issue you seem to have isolated from the Mac version. I will test to see if using '/File/Close' instead of the button in on files tabs works for us as well.

I'm looking forward to v15.3!

Mikael Nordvall

I can confirm that Brians method of closing files seems to be a workaround.

Open two files, starting a selection window and closing the file while the selection window is still active will not crash the application if the file is closed by using 'File/close/' in the drop-down menus.