RFR: 8355631: The events might be generated after VM_DEATH event

[Serguei Spitsyn]

On Thu, 25 Sep 2025 21:43:46 GMT, Leonid Mesnik <lmesnik at openjdk.org> wrote:

> The JVMTI spec says: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/24/docs/specs/jvmti.html#VMDeath
> `The VM death event notifies the agent of the termination of the VM. No events will occur after the VMDeath event.`
> 
> However, current implementation changes state and only after this start disabling events.  
> 
> It might be not a conformance issue, because there is no way to get thread state in the very beginning of event. 
> The main practical issue is that currently certain events are generated when VM is becoming dead. So any function in event should check error against JVMTI_PHASE_DEAD. We can easily trigger it by running tests with enabled https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8352654
> 
> The proposed fix to disable all event generation and then post the last (VMDeath) event. After this event is completed  change VM phase to death. It's guaranteed that no any events are generated after VMDeath completion.
> 
> After this fix the VMDeath callback also can't generate any events. 
> The alternative is to disable events posting after VMDeath completion and before changing VM state. However, seems it is still a gap between vm death event completion and disabling events. So user can see events after VMDeath completion.
> 
> It might be still possible also to wait while all currently executing  events are completed. It is not required be specification, might add unneeded complexity. So  I want to apply this fix first and then to check if we still any problems.
> Then, I plan to wait with timeout until all current (and queued) jvmti events are completed with some reasonable timeout.
> Currently, I haven't seen problems with this fix and  https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8352654.

It is a nice move to a right direction in fixing this long standing issue, so thank you for attacking it now! It should fix all WRONG_PHASE failures we are constantly observing with our mach5 test runs. We had and fixed a similar issue in the JDWP agent a long time ago, so a similar approach can be used here. Disabling all JVMTI events (except the VM_DEATH) is one part of the solution. Another part is that we should wait for all agent callbacks in progress to complete their work at the VM_DEATH point before the VM_DEATH event is posted. I see it has been already discussed in the PR comments. I'd suggest to consider to handle it here.

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PR Review: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/27504#pullrequestreview-3287099388