Unusual Crash (VMTRAP)

[Neil Morrison]

Hi all,

Hoping someone can offer some advice on an issue we recently encountered.

Platform: Windows 10
Smalltalk: v13

Our application (now 26yrs old) has been running happily for a very long time.
Recently we started encountering application crashes (VMTraps).

I've worked forwards from a known working version to the failing version and limited the issue to appear to be caused by an innocuous change, no different to any other change made over many years.

To resolve I simply edited the methods that changed - so effectively no change but recompiled none the less.
Voila, application back to being stable again!!!

I question relates to whether there is a way of going over all the code in the system and compiling it and comparing the resulting bytecode say to that stored in Envy.

Or alternatively any other suggestion as how this may occur

The VMtraps manifest something like the following:

-Walkbacks-------------------------------
<broken-class-038652B5>:<nil> {running,1}
P2SESecurityTabsPanel-class>>abtUntranslatedConstants
OSFuncdesc>>wFuncFlags
CwAppContext>>suspendSmalltalk

The trap file is different every time but always shows as a broken-class?

Neil Morrison
Principal Developer
Royal New Zealand Police

[Henry Johansen]

Hi Neil!

That sounds like an issue we wouldn't mind investigating closer.

If you open a support case, we can allocate a task to (at least) create a script to do the bytecode comparison you are asking for.

Cheers,

Henry Johansen VAST Consultant Senior Software Engineer  hjoh...@instantiations.com  instantiations.com

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[Richard Sargent]

Neil,

That broken-class-... business looks more like a Process than a class.

e.g.
UIProcess:(2025-08-14 09:53:20){running,3}
Process:Idle 09:52:53{ready,1}
Process:CwAsyncIOProcess{suspended,4}
(*Process instances shown in an Inspector window. Why the stack dump would not be able to print the class name is beyond me. Having a nil process name is certainly allowed, per Process>>#processName.)

Can you find the string broken-class in your image?
Is there any chance you have created your own subclass of Process? (I can't really imagine doing so, but ...)
The #abtUntranslatedConstants all simply answer a literal Array of Strings, so why that method would fail is indeed a mystery.
In fact, that stack dump just doesn't make sense. None of those methods sends the next. But, I guess that's why it's so puzzling to you.

[Neil Morrison]

Yeah - not creating processes - just clicking in the UI

The vm trap logs often refer to classes that the user is nowhere and unlikely to have ever visited
Odd indeed!!

Problem is resolved by editing/saving the code - problem is finding that code.
I've started with the last working known map and working forwards, doing a build and running the app (multiple times) and wait for it to crash (anywhere between 1min and 24hrs+).

Instantiations are looking to provide a script that can verify the bytecode against the source code - should speed up the process in case it happens again in the future

Regards,

N