RFR: 8132306: java/lang/ref/ReferenceEnqueue.java fails with "RuntimeException: Error: poll() returned null; expected ref object"

[Daniel Fuchs]

Hi Peter,

I'm glad you're looking at this too! We can't have too many eyes :-)

On 30/07/15 10:38, Peter Levart wrote:
> Suppose we have a Reference 'r' and it's associated ReferenceQueue 'q'.
> Currently it can happen that the following evaluates to true, which is
> surprising:
>
> q.poll() == null && r.isEnqueued()
>

But on the other hand this can only happen if two different
threads are polling the queue - in which case only one of them
will get the reference. In such a situation, the symmetric condition
would not be surprising (as the other thread would
get q.poll() != null):

    r.isEnqueued() && q.poll() == null

The original bug fixed by Kim is more surprising, because there's only
one Thread doing the polling, and it does get:

    r.isEnqueud() && q.poll() == null

although nobody else is polling the queue.
This should no longer occur in this situation with Kim's fix.

cheers,

-- daniel