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Windows 10 works incorrectly with Large memory pages

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31–40 of 96 posts

Re: Windows 10 works incorrectly with Large memory pages

#31
So, as much as I hate to hate on somebody here, Igor is... somewhat unreliable with regards to these issues.

Igor is infamous for disabling virtually every setting. 7-Zip has no ASLR, compiler-stack checks, or anything what-so-ever. Igor refuses to use a modern VC++ (Visual Studio 2015 and later have FREE versions available for open-source code) that would solve a lot of security issues and bugs.

I'm not entirely sure if this is a Win10 problem, or if its a 7-Zip problem. Any complaints from the 7-Zip dev IMO will require a very careful eye: 7-Zip code is not necessarily in the cleanest state or using the best practices.

Re: Windows 10 works incorrectly with Large memory pages

#32
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens to mine if I have an update pending, worth checking if it's an intermittent issue.

I've dug into it several times. First it was network adapter, which for some reason had a default setting to wake on any received packet (lol, wut?). Then it was waking because there was some setting deep in the system about waking up for scheduled operations. (not scheduled tasks, but timers within individual processes... why???) Now it started again but this time the power management tools report no reason for the…

> Now it started again but this time the power management tools report no reason for the wake.

I ran into this after building a system and it was very frustrating. IIRC my problems were related to my network card and having virtualbox installed. Also turning off wake for my mouse helped (bumping the desk would turn on the computer).

Re: Windows 10 works incorrectly with Large memory pages

#33
post #2

For all the improvements to Windows that have come from Microsoft thanks Nadella & co., it is still rather shocking to realize Windows has no public bug tracker, and no real way to report these issues besides screaming loudly and hoping someone in Redmond hears you. It's even worse customer service than Google, which is quite an achievement.

On the other end of that spectrum, it seems MS have had large teams of QA people doing proactive outreach for security problems. My family members have been contacted 6 times in the past 2 years, each time to let them know that MS had detected a security problem and they needed to help us install a patch immediately.

Re: Windows 10 works incorrectly with Large memory pages

#34
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Api abuse should not lead to system crashes or global memory corruption.

Maybe, large pages are such a specialty feature on windows that generally speaking this use case was never supported. I'm not saying the crashes shouldn't be fixed. But VirtualAlloc should fail much faster because there are no large pages to alloc.

Yes, that would be one possible fix.

Re: Windows 10 works incorrectly with Large memory pages

#35
post #2

For all the improvements to Windows that have come from Microsoft thanks Nadella & co., it is still rather shocking to realize Windows has no public bug tracker, and no real way to report these issues besides screaming loudly and hoping someone in Redmond hears you. It's even worse customer service than Google, which is quite an achievement.

Reminds me that for some time now the SD reader on a certain model of Intel Atom package has a bad driver. A driver supplied by Microsoft via automatic updates, that can't be rolled back.

This seems to affect a number of models from a number of OEMs that use the same "template".

Re: Windows 10 works incorrectly with Large memory pages

#36
post #2

For all the improvements to Windows that have come from Microsoft thanks Nadella & co., it is still rather shocking to realize Windows has no public bug tracker, and no real way to report these issues besides screaming loudly and hoping someone in Redmond hears you. It's even worse customer service than Google, which is quite an achievement.

On the other end of that spectrum, it seems MS have had large teams of QA people doing proactive outreach for security problems. My family members have been contacted 6 times in the past 2 years, each time to let them know that MS had detected a security problem and they needed to help us install a patch immediately.

Not sure if joking, as that sounds like a scam call...

Re: Windows 10 works incorrectly with Large memory pages

#37
post #26

In reading the article it's clear this is not a bug, it's API abuse. The documentation for VirtualAlloc is very clear that Large Pages should be a one time allocation thing are not intended for general malloc replacement.

Api abuse should not lead to system crashes or global memory corruption.

Large pages cannot be paged to disk (lol: amount of time to write 2MB to disk while the scheduler is locked), and are prone to fragmentation.

When you use Large Pages and you run out of contiguous 2MB chunks, what do you do then?

Unlike Linux, Windows actually guarantees its memory to anything that requested it. Windows does NOT ever "take back" memory and crash processes randomly (see Linux's OOM killer). But this guarantee has its own issue on Windows: important services who make requests for new bits of code will crash instead.

So Large Pages naturally will run out the longer a system runs. They are a limited resource: how often do you find a contiguous 2MB block when most programs request memory in 4kB blocks?? And the longer a system runs, the fewer 2MB blocks will exist.

I guess Linux handles the issue by making normal pool, large pool, and "huge" pool all separate. So you can run out of normal-pool but have lots of large-pool space remaining. But this has the disadvantage of being wasteful (Ex: 1GB Huge Pool permanently eats up 1GB that the smaller pools can't ever use).

------------

Ultimately, applications aren't supposed to use the OS-level memory allocator as if it were malloc / free. Because when fragmentation hits you in malloc/free, you mess up your own memory.

But if fragmentation hits you at the OS-level, you're basically screwing the entire system.

Re: Windows 10 works incorrectly with Large memory pages

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather unconventional, but Windows 10 on desktop and mobile do have a Feedback Hub [1] where Windows 10 users are able to provide all sorts of feedback, either as a suggestion or a problem . All the feedbacks are public and users can freely vote them up to draw more attention on them. The more vote they have, the more likely they receive a response from the developers and also get the priority in the queue of issues…

As a Microsoft employee, I can say that that feedback is taken pretty seriously in most teams, especially if the description is good or if the problem recorder/screenshot tool is used. It's not all based on up votes.

Hmm...excited to hear that I can stop devoting time to figuring out why my wife's laptop constantly runs its fan due to service processes that constantly burn CPU!

Re: Windows 10 works incorrectly with Large memory pages

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other end of that spectrum, it seems MS have had large teams of QA people doing proactive outreach for security problems. My family members have been contacted 6 times in the past 2 years, each time to let them know that MS had detected a security problem and they needed to help us install a patch immediately.

Not sure if joking, as that sounds like a scam call...

Probably forgot the tag.

Re: Windows 10 works incorrectly with Large memory pages

#40
post #2

For all the improvements to Windows that have come from Microsoft thanks Nadella & co., it is still rather shocking to realize Windows has no public bug tracker, and no real way to report these issues besides screaming loudly and hoping someone in Redmond hears you. It's even worse customer service than Google, which is quite an achievement.

I don't think that is true. I haven't used Windows in years, but in the past I have talked to Microsoft support on the phone, as an individual without a support contract. To check that it is still possible, I went through the IT professional and developer support flow [1] and ended up with a button that said "Contact Microsoft. Have a technical support representative contact you. Start request". So it is at least pos…

The last time I tried to use Microsoft's support, the only way I was able to contact them was via a webchat, which at first dumped me into a long and infuriating "dialogue" with their support AI - it was the chatroom equivalent of an IVR, and just as useless.

At least, after I managed to get past the faux-IVR, the support staff was competent enough.

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