ps2link crashes with EE exception after starting up

[cosmito]

I recently built the latest from master of the toolchain, ps2eth and ps2link and found out that an EE exception happens during or after initialization of ps2link.

Exception details: TLB load/inst fetch exception, cause 10008008 BadAddr 3A0D2BE8, status 70030C13, EPC 88188.

Under the guidance of https://github.com/fjtrujy I tried to troubleshoot it and to find out the breaking change but not successful.

We found that the ps2link built as artifact of CI 17 (https://github.com/ps2dev/ps2link/actions/runs/477067363) still works but the one from CI 18 (https://github.com/fjtrujy/ps2link/actions/runs/653975338) crashes.

I reverted locally the change that was done in between (ps2dev/ps2sdk#164) but that didn't made any difference. Also, I tried to revert locally the upgrade newlib to 4.1.0 (https://github.com/ps2dev/ps2toolchain-ee/blob/main/scripts/003-newlib.sh#L7) but 4.0.0 gave the same exception again (I tried all the possibilities of combining the two changes).

[AKuHAK]

Please provide more details when this exception happen. Does it happened just when loading ps2link.elf, or it is happen when you try to load some program from ps2client? Also try to move ps2link to memory card.

[cosmito]

It happens during initialization of ps2link.elf, so before any loading of an .elf with ps2client.

[AKuHAK]

looks like you have some cached config enabled, maybe t tries to load some irx files, which are mentioned in *.txt config file. Please create a directory on a memory card and copy there only ps2link

[cosmito]

I did that now, created a folder in my memory card and copied over ps2link.elf only. After executing from there, I get the same result regarding the exception (during initialization it gets the default IP since I left out the extra.cnf, IPCONFIG.DAT, system.cnf).

I also tried to copy everything and I get the exception too.

[cosmito]

looks like you have some cached config enabled, maybe t tries to load some irx files, which are mentioned in *.txt config file. Please create a directory on a memory card and copy there only ps2link

Please note that ps2link.elf from CI 17 works perfectly with all the same config files.

[rickgaiser]

In the Makefile you can enable an extra debugging option. I've reproduced the issue, it crashes after this line:

Somehow the issue is only present with the compressed version of the elf (bin/PS2LINK.ELF). The uncompressed elf (ee/ps2link.elf) seems to work fine.

The loading of this elf has many steps, perhaps there's an overlapping memory section somewhere causing corruption? Or perhaps it's a bug in ps2-packer? Adding -a 64 to ps2-packer also seems to fix the issue. Could this be an alignment issue in ps2-packer? Can we somehow check?

Also note that I've used an old "high loading" version of ps2link to test loading the new ps2link. The high and low loading versions of ps2link produce different results, suggesting a section overlap is the issue?

I hope this helps in finding the real issue(s).

[fjtrujy]

Hello,
After the PR that I have just generated #22 , the CI is generating again functional ps2link.elf.
Not sure if it is related but we're now saving about 64KB, maybe the crash was related to the limited space that we have to ubicate ps2link.

ps2link loaded at 0x00083FF8-0x000D1E7C

Thanks!

[rickgaiser]

One thing I notice in Rules.make (after looking at #22) is that we use EE_LIBS += -lc -lkernel-nopatch but we don't set -nodefaultlibs or -nostdlib anywhere. So probably both libkernel (a default library) and libkernel-nopatch are linked?

[fjtrujy]

I noticed yesterday the same, I think that we can reduce the size even more

[fjtrujy]

@cosmito @AKuHAK and @rickgaiser, hello to all,
We have done some changes in the ps2toolchain and now IOP uses newer GCC/Binutils versions.
Not sure if this will solve the current crash we were suffering in this thread, but please let's take a look ( I don't have currently a PS2 so I can't test myself)

Thanks

[fjtrujy]

I have done another improvement into ps2link, solving all the warnings and making the binary even smaller.

There is an interesting warning:
fjtrujy@b3dd75a

I resolved reading this thread
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16879434/why-do-these-c-struct-definitions-give-warnings-and-errors

I think these warnings started to appear when we upgraded the toolchain, the important thing here is that the ps2eth compilation (which is needed by ps2link) is still full of these warnings.
Maybe this was one of the reasons why ps2link was crashing.

Thanks

[fjtrujy]

The #26 has been merged, and @AKuHAK confirmed that ps2link is now NOT crashing.

Anyway, I will keep this issue opened till @cosmito, double-checks it.

https://github.com/ps2dev/ps2link/releases/tag/v1.7.0

Thanks

[cosmito]

Hi @fjtrujy, I am kind of very busy these days... But I can find some minutes over the next days to upload a compiled .ELF and try.
Should I try from this one? https://github.com/ps2dev/ps2link/releases/tag/v1.7.0

[fjtrujy]

Hi @fjtrujy, I am kind of very busy these days... But I can find some minutes over the next days to upload a compiled .ELF and try.

Should I try from this one? https://github.com/ps2dev/ps2link/releases/tag/v1.7.0

Yes it should work fine

[cosmito]

The bug was fixed. Tested with https://github.com/ps2dev/ps2link/releases/tag/v1.7.0.