New: IPSM bug

[Guest The PocketTV Team]

I couldn't find any mention of this bug on this forum, so here it is.

This bug is well knowns and has been discussed on other threads on this and other forums:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&...9.phx.gbl#link1

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&...2.phx.gbl#link1

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=ipsm+tfa....phx.gbl&rnum=4

In short, some applications will behave erratically when installed and run from IPSM (i.e. from the phone's internal permanent flash filesystem, called IPSM or Storage).

The same application will just runs fine from SD card or from RAM.

So if you see erratic behavior when developing your app and running it from IPSM on the device, try running it from an SD card.

This problems is caused by a bug in Intel's IPSM driver which is provided by MSFT and used by OEM to manage the internal flash filesystem. MSFT recently developed a replacement driver called TFAT to replace IPSM. But IPSM is used in all Smartphone 2002 (and Pocket PC 2002 and earlier) devices, and it is still used in some Smartphone 2003 (and Pocket PC 2003) devices.

The only workaround is to copy all the application's .exe and .dll files in RAM and run the application from RAM, then delete the copied files from RAM once the application process terminates. That's what we do with PocketTV, since it triggers the IPSM bug.

The IPSM bug is generally triggered by relatively large applications with multiple threads, probably because they execute code pages that are far apart in the .exe file.