RFR: JDK-8296907: VMError: add optional callstacks, siginfo for secondary errors [v2]

[Thomas Stuefe]

On Mon, 14 Nov 2022 05:16:05 GMT, David Holmes <dholmes at openjdk.org> wrote:

> Seems reasonable in terms of the code, but I am curious how you expect this to be used in practice? If you get a secondary crash with this turned off then I would expect to use gdb on the core file to get the secondary stack, rather than using the new flag and hoping to reproduce the problem. To be useful it seems you would have to remember to run with this always enabled when developing/debugging. ??

Yes, sure. It is easier than getting the code and starting gdb, especially if you have no access to the core.

If the secondary error is reproducible, and they often are, and the developer's goal is to fix them, he sets the option. Even if they are not reproducible - if people get annoyed enough, we can just enable it for tests where they regularly happen. The option does not cost anything in terms of normal runtime. We also could always enable it in runtime/ErrorHandling tests. At SAP, we even have test specifically for sniffing out and fixing secondary crashes, but since they are work-intensive in practice we never contributed them.

Not sure if you followed https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/pull/11017. Here and in other RFEs we argued about granularity of error-reporting STEPs with their seconary-signal-catch capability. There were voices for making them more fine-grained. But that would cause other problems, and therefore it would be good to harden out the error reporting code instead. This RFE tries to make this work a little less onerous.

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PR: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/11118