If you are working with Vulkan, chances are that at some point you’ll run into a VK_ERROR_DEVICE_LOST error. It’s the worst kind of error, chances are that your GPU choked on some data sometime about a frame or two ago and the position where you received the error is nowhere near where the GPU actually decided to throw up its hands and give up. This is of course because GPUs and CPUs are inherently decoupled from each other, and when you submit your work from the CPU to the GPU, the GPU will start crunching your numbers while in the meantime the CPU goes on with its busy life doing other things. Read post

Let’s say that you occasionally look at your application with NSight, VTune, or any other profiling tool of choice. Naturally you want to add debug markers into your application, but you might not necessarily ship with them or have them run at all when no profiling tool is attached. You could put them behind a command line flag, but I prefer automatic discovery: One build, when run with NSight, having all the debug markers I need to dissect a frame, and when run without NSight not doing any of that overhead. Read post

11 months ago was the last time I touched firedrake, and last weekend the urge to mess with it caught me again. So I set up WSL, installed all necessary dependencies and opened firedrake. I fired up the last compiled version I had, just to remind myself of where I had left things, and I QEMU was happy to dump my debug printf()’s via the virtual UART into stdout. All was good. Read post

X-Plane’s plugin systems allows authors to load models in two ways: Asynchronously and Synchronously. Most plugins tend to use synchronous loading, but since all plugins run on the main thread there is a need and desire for some to use asynchronous loading. Up until now, the latter was broken however, and plugin authors complained about invisible models. From what I understand Pilot Edge were the first to complain, but they want to use async loading to dynamically load in models of planes that flew in via multiplayer, which makes it non-trivial to debug. Read post

This post is about a crash to desktop that I investigated in a popular plugin for X-Plane, X-Assign. This happened in my free time, although I had the advantage of having the X-Plane source code at hand. Git bisect My new favourite tool on earth is git bisect, which I used to find the offending commit rather quickly. At this point I wasn’t sure who was at fault for the crash, X-Plane or X-Assign, since the issue only showed up with the update to X-Plane 11. Read post