boost 1.51 + wine assertion crash #1719

A new issue with boost::interprocess in boost 1.51: it is incompatible with Wine. Not only that, but it makes bitcoin crash out with an assertion failure:

boost/interprocess/detail/windows_intermodule_singleton.hpp:145

Message: &get_map_unlocked() == m

It occurs immediately after new message_queue(...). It seems that Wine (1.4, which comes with Ubuntu Precise) doesn't have support for Windows semaphores, as it logs a message:

fixme:ntdll:NtQuerySemaphore (0x320,0,0x1b3f290,0x00000008,0x1b3f2a4) stub!

Which is fine, if it just meant no URI support. But as said, boost crashes the entire process. This is no issue for people running on Windows, but for us testing windows builds in Wine this is incredibly annoying.

I'm really getting tired of boost::interprocess issues on Windows. The whole construction with shared memory objects is overkill for the job, anyway. Bonus points for someone that re-implements qtipcserver with a simple QLocalSocket (which uses named pipes) :-)

Edit: Boost 1.50 does not suffer from this problem, only 1.51+ does.

How do other applications (Armory? Electrum? MultiBit?) solve this?

Is Wine 1.4 current? When most of my smaller pulls are in I'll perhaps take a look at QLocalSocket ;).

Well at least Firefox does remoting through X11/win32 messages, which would be most appropriate for an UI.

But Qt has no support for such IPC mechanisms (except DBus, but that's linux-only) so that would be another compatibility layer... so I think a named pipe is second best, and in contrary to shared memory magic, has a small attack surface.

• Armory: opens a TCP port, 8223 or 8224 (depending on testnet)
• Electrum: seems to start a new UI for every URL (as of 25ad5fc)
• MultiBit: support drag&drop of QR codes, I was not able to find any browser remoting mechanism (as of cd83087)

And yes, Wine 1.4 is current, as it is installed by default in the latest version of at least one big distribution (Ubuntu).

Another reason for moving away from boost::interprocess_queue: it is not supported on Mac (see 4060d64fc9de6f11ae69f3961d4f1f0450dd8286)

Closing this, no longer an issue as we don't use boost::interprocess anymore. Joy!