Intermittent CLI failure: "assertion failed [block != nullptr]: BasicBlock requested for unrecognized address"

[mklement0]

Prerequisites

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• Make sure you are able to repro it on the latest released version
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• Refer to the FAQ.
• Refer to Differences between Windows PowerShell 5.1 and PowerShell.

Steps to reproduce

Note:

• This happens as of PowerShell Core 7.3.0-preview.5, but not in 7.2.5
• It happens on an M1 Mac (ARM CPU) - haven't looked for it on other platforms.
• It happens intermittently, hence the repetition of the command below.
• I don't know if PowerShell or perhaps .NET is to blame.

1..1e2 | % { pwsh -nop -c '"hi"' }

Expected behavior

hi 
... # repeated 100 times in total

Actual behavior

hi
...
assertion failed [block != nullptr]: BasicBlock requested for unrecognized address
(BuilderBase.h:550 block_for_offset)
...
hi
...
assertion failed [block != nullptr]: BasicBlock requested for unrecognized address
(BuilderBase.h:550 block_for_offset)
hi
...

Error details

Intermittently, you'll see the following error message - sometimes hi prints, sometimes it doesn't:

assertion failed [block != nullptr]: BasicBlock requested for unrecognized address
(BuilderBase.h:550 block_for_offset)

Environment data

PowerShell Core v7.3.0-preview.5 (.NET 7.0.0-preview.5.22301.12) on macOS 12.4, on an M1 (ARM) MacBook Pro.

Visuals

No response

[kasini3000]

hi, I use win10 x86 platform and can't reproduce it.
anybody try it on win,linux vm on mac?

[StevenBucher98]

If I copy directly the code: 1..1e2 | % { pwsh -nop -c '"hi"' } I get:

hi: The term 'hi' is not recognized as a name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or executable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.

but if I rather do something like this 1..1e2 | % { pwsh -nop -c Write-Host "hi" } seems to work fine. I am Windows 11 x64 and 7.3.0-preview5

[mklement0]

Thanks, @kasini3000 and @StevenBucher98:

I realized that I was inadvertently running the x64 version of PowerShell on my M1 (ARM64) Mac (using the Rosetta 2 emulation environment), and it seems that the problem only occurs there.

• As an aside: This happened because the installation script currently isn't ARM-aware on non-Windows platforms:
  • Make https://aka.ms/install-powershell.ps1 support non-Windows ARM platforms #17663

Since this is an exotic and ill-advised setup, I presume it isn't worth pursuing, so I'm closing this.

---

As for 1..1e2 | % { pwsh -nop -c '"hi"' } not working for you, @StevenBucher98:
This implies that you've either turned off the PSNativeCommandArgumentPassing experimental feature or you've set $PSNativeCommandArgumentPassing to Legacy.

• I was going to suggest 1..1e2 | % { pwsh -nop -c { "hi" } } as the simplest (albeit slower) workaround, which caused me to stumble upon this:
  • Obscure failure of the CLI with repeated script-block based invocations, on Windows only #17665