Unexpected LoadLibrary Failures

A few weeks ago two users reported a problem with SourceMod — it was failing to load on their Windows servers. The error message from Metamod:Source was simply this:

Plugin failed to load: ()

Of course, there should have been an error there. The code behind loading a plugin looks something like:

Select All Code:
if ((handle = LoadLibrary(plugin)) == NULL)
{
   DWORD error = GetLastError();
   char buffer[255];
 
   FormatMessage(blah, blah, error, blah);
   Print("Plugin failed to load: (%s)", buffer);
}

Clearly, there were two problems: LoadLibrary() was failing, and so was FormatMessage(). So, I changed the function to print the value of error instead of buffer, and got:

Plugin failed to load (0xc000001d)

Whoa! That’s not a normal system error code. In fact it’s the value of EXCEPTION_ILLEGAL_INSTRUCTION. From there I knew the answer: SourceMod was being compiled with SSE instructions, and the user’s processor was too old. To verify, I went to his computer’s properties and saw that he had an 800MHz AMD Duron, which lacked SSE support (according to Wikipedia).

My solution to this problem wasn’t to remove SSE instructions, but rather to alter our usage of FormatMessage(). I couldn’t find any documentation that LoadLibrary() could churn out exception codes through GetLastError(), which is odd considering that Microsoft’s MSDN is usually good about documenting such oddities. However, there is a simple workaround: If FormatMessage() fails, we now just print the original error code.

Why didn’t we disable the SSE requirement? It didn’t seem prudent to punish the 99.6% of users who had SSE support.

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