RFR: 8005290: remove -showversion from RMI test library subprocess mechanism

[Chris Hegarty]

 From my limited knowledge of this, it look ok to me.

-Chris.

On 20/12/2012 01:11, Stuart Marks wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Please review the fix [1] for bug 8005290 [2].
>
> [1] http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~smarks/reviews/8005290/webrev.0/
>
> [2] http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=8005290
>
> I just filed this bug, so it hasn't made it to the public website yet.
> The salient text from the bug report is as follows:
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The RMI test library (jdk/test/java/rmi/testlibrary) has a convenience
> API (the JavaVM class) for launching a JVM subprocess. When starting the
> subprocess, it adds the -showversion option to the JVM command line and
> waits for the version output to arrive from the subprocess before
> returning to the caller. This is intended to avoid race conditions where
> the test might try to contact the subprocess before it's fully initialized.
>
> It turns out this doesn't really work and it's also unnecessary.
>
> The reason it doesn't really work is that the version string is emitted
> when the JVM subprocess has mostly started up, but it hasn't yet
> executed any user code. Even after the version string has been emitted,
> the caller may still have to wait and retry before successfully
> contacting a service exported by the subprocess. The current code
> returns after two seconds, even if the version string hasn't been
> received from the subprocess. So the caller has to wait and potentially
> retry anyway. Since the callers have to do this anyway, having the
> library wait for the version string isn't helpful.
>
> Other library code (e.g., RMID) starts the subprocess and waits until a
> particular RMI service is ready, so the -showversion mechanism is
> redundant in that case. Finally, many tests start the subprocess and
> wait until it finishes, so they don't need the -showversion mechanism
> either.
>
> Finally, the -showversion mechanism adds a lot of complexity, as it has
> to interpose between the subprocess output stream and the caller, so
> we're better off just removing it. All RMI tests continue to pass even
> with this mechanism removed.
> ------------------------------------------------------------
>
> This is basically just test cleanup (no library code changes) to clear
> the way for future test enhancements to improve performance and
> reliability.
>
> Thanks,
>
> s'marks