Unsafe: removing the monitorEnter/monitorExit/tryMonitorEnter methods

[Martin Buchholz]

I don't recall having added this particular wart
to test/java/lang/ProcessBuilder/Basic.java, and history suggests that
others did that.

It does seem that being able to tell whether a java object monitor is
currently locked is useful for debugging and monitoring - there should be a
way to do that.


On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 7:12 AM, Paul Sandoz <paul.sandoz at oracle.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Out of all the methods on Unsafe i think the
> monitorEnter/monitorExit/tryMonitorEnter are the least used and are very
> strong candidates for removal.
>
> 99% of use-cases are supported by classes in the
> java.util.concurrent.locks package.
>
>
> Within the JDK itself it is only used in one JDK test file
> test/java/lang/ProcessBuilder/Basic.java:
>
>                     while (unsafe.tryMonitorEnter(s)) {
>                         unsafe.monitorExit(s);
>                         Thread.sleep(1);
>                     }
>
> for a test verifying an EOF is received on pending reads and it is polling
> to check when the process builder acquires the lock before destroying the
> process, presumably to avoid some sort of race condition that occasionally
> causes the test to fail.
>
> I believe this test as been through a number of rounds, i stared at things
> for a bit, but cannot quickly work out a replacement; i lack the knowledge
> on this area.
>
>
> Outside of the JDK i can only find one usage of monitorExit/Enter
> (according to grep code) in JBoss modules, and i believe this is only used
> on Java 1.6 to work around some limitations in class loading that were
> fixed in 1.7.
>
>
> Given such very limited use i propose to remove these methods after having
> worked out a fix for ProcessBuilder/Basic.java test.
>
> Paul.
>