Environment variables truth source of the JVM (and how to mutate it)

[Martijn Verburg]

Hi Pierre,

Welcome to OpenJDK!  This question is best asked over on the core-libs-dev
mailing list.  This mailing list is more for general discussions about the
community itself.

Cheers,
Martijn

On 10 May 2017 at 12:55, pierre at 2bst.fr <pierre at 2bst.fr> wrote:

>
> Hi, I've been trying to understand how the JVM accesses environment
> variables and how they can be mutated.
>
> I sent an email on this list few minutes ago but it appears to be
> ill-formatted and hardly legible. Sorry for double post: I resend it
> with better formatting hopefully.
>
> For this I've made some assumptions and I would like to know if they're
> correct, could you help me on this?
>
> 1) It appears that the JVM gets a copy of its process environment
> variables and store them in static final fields
> theUnmodifiableEnvironment and theEnvironment of class
> java.lang.ProcessEnvironment.
>
> - My assumption is: these fields are the "truth source" about
>   environment variables inside the JVM and any attempt to access some of
>   them will end up in a lookup of this fields.
>
> - I have a question about this: why two final fields instead of only
>   one? Perhaps theUnmodifiableEnvironment stands for base JVM env whilst
>   theEnvironment is for env of current process (which could be changed
>   with Process.exec(String[] cmdarray, String[] envp, File dir))?
>
> 2) There is a subtle way to mutate them in Sun JDK (see
> http://www.javaspecialists.eu/archive/Issue161.html).
>
> - My assumption is: These fields are passed to all new JVM threads, so
>   mutating them (as ugly as it can sound) will be JVM-wide and will
>   result in all thread getting mutated env as their environment
>   variables.
>
> - Sensitive question: is this enforced? System.getenv() appears to
>   correctly returns mutated env, can I deduce all new threads in the JVM
>   will get mutated values?
>
> - Another sensitive question: as these fields are static final, can I
>   deduce all threads in the JVM will get mutated values, not only new
>   ones?
>
> It would be my pleasure to provide further details ifneedsbe. Just let
> me know if some of the above assumptions are incorrect! Again, please
> forgive that double post.
>
> Yours faithfully,
>
> p2b
>