Create info crushes the instancing

Question

After I decided to enable the VK_KHR_SWAPCHAIN_EXTENSION_NAME extension, I started getting the error “access rights violation when reading at address 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF.” in the vkCreateInstance execution line.

After debugging, I noticed that the problem was filling the ppEnabledExtensionNames value of the VkInstanceCreateInfo structure. I decided to wrap the glfw extensions into a vector and use that to populate the structure. Here is the code for the function to fill this structure.

VkInstanceCreateInfo VulkanManager::paste_create_info(VkApplicationInfo* app_info)
{
    VkInstanceCreateInfo create_info{};
    vector<const char*> device_extensions = {
        VK_KHR_SWAPCHAIN_EXTENSION_NAME,
    };
    uint32_t glfw_extensions_count = 0;
    const char** glfw_extensions;

    create_info.sType = VK_STRUCTURE_TYPE_INSTANCE_CREATE_INFO;
    create_info.pApplicationInfo = app_info;

    glfw_extensions = glfwGetRequiredInstanceExtensions(&glfw_extensions_count);

    for (int i = 0; i < glfw_extensions_count; i++)
        device_extensions.push_back(glfw_extensions[i]);

    create_info.enabledExtensionCount = (uint32_t) device_extensions.size();
    create_info.ppEnabledExtensionNames = device_extensions.data();

    create_info.enabledLayerCount = 0;

    return create_info;
}

Code of filling VkApplicationInfo structure:

{
    VkApplicationInfo app_info{};

    app_info.sType = VK_STRUCTURE_TYPE_APPLICATION_INFO;
    app_info.pApplicationName = "Triangle";
    app_info.applicationVersion = VK_MAKE_VERSION(1, 0, 0);
    app_info.pEngineName = "No Engine";
    app_info.engineVersion = VK_MAKE_VERSION(1, 0, 0);
    app_info.apiVersion = VK_API_VERSION_1_0;

    return app_info;
}

And code of creating vulkan instance:

void VulkanManager::create_vulkan()
{
    VkApplicationInfo app_info = VulkanManager::paste_app_info();
    VkInstanceCreateInfo create_info = VulkanManager::paste_create_info(&app_info);

Most likely this is an error related to pointers; pointers can lose their value while being transferred to a vector

Answer 1

The device_extensions in VulkanManager::paste_create_info() will be out of scope after you returned create_info, thus when you call vkCreateInstance(create_info) somewhere down the line, create_info.ppEnabledExtensionNames will be pointing to an invalid address, causing memory access violation.

As a side-note, you should rename device_extensions to instance_extensions since those are two different concepts as mentioned here.