64bit won't work on my older Xeon CPU

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Broke Astronomer
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64bit won't work on my older Xeon CPU

#1

Post by Broke Astronomer »

I have an older Xeon 6 core 12 thread cpu that is pretty good for an astronomy PC in my observatory. I use it with everything except 64bit Sharpcap because it generates an error message saying it is not compatible with my instruction set.

Any way to add back in support for these old CPU's?

"Your CPU does not appear to support the AVX instruction set, which the 64-bit version of Sharpcap crrently requires"
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Re: 64bit won't work on my older Xeon CPU

#2

Post by admin »

Hi,

I've tried a couple of times to make this work correctly, and despite investing quite a bit of effort into it haven't made it work so far. It's a bit annoying, because it's supposed to only use those instructions when they are present, but the system also seems to want to use them for general housekeeping code, and I haven't yet worked out how to get the bits that I want without the bits that I don't want :(

Cheers, Robin
drjustice
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Re: 64bit won't work on my older Xeon CPU

#3

Post by drjustice »

Hi,

I just bought a new long-battery life laptop based on a low-power intel N5030 CPU, and I have the same issue, same message.

I get the same message, except my cpu is like a 2019-2020 cpu ! Let's say I did not expect this.

Has there been any progress on this?

BTW I am also a software developer (C++ mostly) with pretty good experience in image processing, so if you need help fixing this issue for x64 I could probably lend a hand for free to rid the software of avx requirements.

PM or email me if interested.
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Re: 64bit won't work on my older Xeon CPU

#4

Post by admin »

Hi,

the problem is buried deep in OpenCV, which SharpCap uses for image processing (see https://github.com/opencv/opencv/issues/15690 and related issues), which could be fixed by turning off the AVX support, but that sacrifices performance for the vast majority of users who do have AVX support. I'm kind of reluctant to do that, since the fraction with no AVX will drop even more as time passes.

Basically the way OpenCV does AVX etc is a bit rubbish - they recompile a bunch of code under different CPU settings in different namespaces and then link them all together. In theory that should only run AVX code on AVX CPUs, but they missed the fact that some of the code they recompile uses the STL, meaning that you get code generation for common STL functions in all sorts of CPU settings. The linker is then free to pick any implementation if there are multiple ones, since the rules of C++ say they should all be the same. For some reason, in X64 it seems to pick the AVX implementation of something like std::vector::resize(), which uses AVX instructions, which crashes on loading the DLL.

I would be happy to try building a trial version of the required DLL without AVX to see if that works for you - however the difficulty is how to update this on a version by version basis.

thanks,

Robin
drjustice
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Re: 64bit won't work on my older Xeon CPU

#5

Post by drjustice »

Sorry about the delayed response.

Well, it's true that many users have CPUs that support AVX, however there are still many telescope-mounted computers that are still using CPUs that don't support AVX. My brand new J4125 MeLE Quieter2, is one such example. My super-lightweight N5030 laptop is another. And any of the low-power, even brand-new Celerons built on the N6000 platform, are yet another. So I think it would be worthwhile to fix this issue for what's still a large proportion of users.

Anyway, about solutions to this issue.

It seems that there is only 1 x64 problematic DLL and it is so because happens to link with functions that use AVX instructions, for reasons you have stated above. It also seems possible to compile the whole DLL without AVX, but you fear this would impact users that have CPUs that support AVX. Fair enough.

So, I see a couple of ways around this issue.

1) Fight the compiler and try to build a single DLL that will properly detect which methods to use. This seems like a high-effort-low-return kind of proposition.

2) Create a separate x64-no-AVX Sharpcap release (alongside the normal x64 vs x86 releases). Users that don't have AVX can get the warning message, download the correct x64 version. Although "easy", that might be a bit of an overkill solution for only 1 problematic DLL.

3) Build an AVX and a non-AVX DLL and bundle both with the x64 installer. At program start, detect AVX support, and perform a LoadLibrary of the correct (AVX vs non-AVX) DLL. This will require you to perform manual function resolution using GetProcAddress() for the functions that you want to call, so that's a bit of a pain.

4) Build an AVX and a non-AVX DLL and bundle both with the x64 installer. Copy both DLLs to the installation folder. At first start, detect AVX support, and rename the correct DLL to the one the program is looking for. To do this, you might need to compiled the DLL with /DELAYLOAD so that you can rename the DLL with the correct name before it's loaded for use.

5) Build an AVX and a non-AVX DLL and bundle both with the x64 installer. At install time, detect if the CPU has AVX support, and decide which DLL should be installed into the application folder.


As for supporting this on a version-by-version basis, well, of course it would need to be part of your build system, but it certainly could be automated and completely transparent.

Me, I would choose #5.
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Re: 64bit won't work on my older Xeon CPU

#6

Post by admin »

Hi,

I think I would probably go with #3 - there is a trick here... Windows will only ever load one copy of a DLL with a specific name, so if you create two copies and put them in separate folders, both called 'ProblemWithAvx.dll', all you have to do is LoadLibrary() the correct one before anything else tries to load it. From that point on, Windows will see requests for that DLL and do nothing because it is already loaded.

I need to catch up on a few other things first, but will put this on the to-do list.

cheers,

Robin
drjustice
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Re: 64bit won't work on my older Xeon CPU

#7

Post by drjustice »

Great, no rush.

BTW you don't need to load two libraries with the same name.

You can put ProblemDLLWithAvx.dll (A), and ProblemDLLWithoutAvx.dll (B), and what you do is call LoadLibrary on either DLL A, or DLL B depending on whether you detect AVX or not.

LoadLibrary just takes a string (the name of the DLL) so it's easy to decide which one you load.
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Re: 64bit won't work on my older Xeon CPU

#8

Post by admin »

Hi,

I think I have a version that will work with no AVX. So far I have not seen a significant performance drop in my testing, so I will start with just that version for now and re-introduce an optional AVX enabled version if required. Fortunately VirtualBox has a way of configuring what instruction sets are available inside the virtual machine, which allows me to test (as I no longer have any CPUs that do not support AVX). You just have to hold your nose a bit at the idea of installing anything from Oracle on your PC... :)

cheers,

Robin
Splunge
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Joined: Wed Jul 28, 2021 8:12 pm

Re: 64bit won't work on my older Xeon CPU

#9

Post by Splunge »

Robin,

I can confirm that the latest version of SharpCap 64 bit works on non-AVX hardware (Chuwi Larkbox in this case). Thanks for making that happen!

Regards,
james_ca
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Re: 64bit won't work on my older Xeon CPU

#10

Post by james_ca »

I just updated to the Pro version of SharpCap v4.0.8026.0-64bit (released July 27) and I can't allocate more than about 3GB to the capture buffers even though I have 8GB on my Gemini Lake mini PC and I'm running the 64-bit versions of Windows 10 Pro and SharpCap Pro. I think this may be related to the previous issues related to running on a processor without AVX support.

The registration information for my upgrade to the Pro version says I'm valid until July 2022 and Windows recognizes all 8GB of my DRAM. Plus, other features that require SharpCap Pro are functioning and in this particular case I don't have any other apps running other than SharpCap. Also, I've tried restarting SharpCap several times and it never seems to allow more than the aforementioned 3GB of memory for the capture buffers.

Before the update I was getting the warning dialog about the lack of AVX support, but I did an uninstall of SharpCap followed by a fresh installation of the July 27 release and now the warning about AVX doesn't occur but it looks like SharpCap still thinks I can only run in 32-bit mode.

Is this the expected result on a system that does not support AVX?
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