review request: 4244896: (process) Provide System.getPid(), System.killProcess(String pid)

[Rob McKenna]

I've uploaded another webrev to:

http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~robm/4244896/webrev.02/ 
<http://cr.openjdk.java.net/%7Erobm/4244896/webrev.02/>

I plan to spend some time over the coming day or two beefing up the test 
for waitFor (right now its really geared towards destroyForcibly) so I 
won't guarantee its 100% quite yet. That said, I would like feedback on 
a couple of points before I proceed:

1) Alan suggested the use of System.nanoTime() so I altered 
waitFor(long) to allow for a TimeUnit parameter. UnixProcess objects can 
use Object.wait(long, int) but unfortunately WaitForMultipleObjects (on 
Windows) only works to millisecond precision.

2) As Alan noted, there is really no need for isAlive() if people are 
happy with the idea of waitFor(long, TimeUnit). I'd appreciate any 
feedback on this aspect of the fix.

     -Rob

On 19/04/12 12:05, Alan Bateman wrote:
> On 19/04/2012 01:05, David Holmes wrote:
>> On 18/04/2012 11:44 PM, Jason Mehrens wrote:
>>>
>>> Rob,
>>>
>>> It looks like waitFor is calling Object.wait(long) without owning 
>>> this objects monitor.  If I pass Long.MAX_VALUE to waitFor, 
>>> shouldn't waitFor return if the early if the process ends?
>>
>> Also waitFor doesn't call wait() under the guard of a looping 
>> predicate so it will suffer from lost signals and potentially 
>> spurious wakeups. I also don't see anything calling notify[All] to 
>> indicate the process has now terminated. It would appear that 
>> wait(timeout) is being used as a sleep mechanism and that is wrong on 
>> a number of levels.
> I assume waitFor(timout) will require 3 distinct implementations, one 
> for Solaris/Linux/Mac, another for Windows, and a default 
> implementations for Process implementations that exist outside of the 
> JDK.
>
> It's likely the Solaris/Linux/Mac implementation will involve two 
> threads, one to block in waitpid and the other to interrupt it via a 
> signal if the timeout elapses before the child terminates. The Windows 
> implementation should be trivial because it can be a timed wait.
>
> I assume the default implementation (which is what is being discussed 
> here) will need to loop calling exitValue until the timeout elapses or 
> the child terminates. Not very efficient but at least it won't be used 
> when when creating Processes via Runtime.exec or ProcessBuilder.
>
> I think the question we need to consider is whether waitFor(timeout) 
> is really needed. If it's something that it pushed out for another day 
> then it brings up the question as to whether to include isAlive now or 
> not (as waitFor without timeout gives us an isAlive equivalent too).
>
> -Alan.
>
>
>
>