[8u] RFR 6424123: JVM crashes on failed 'strdup' call

[Andrew Haley]

On 08/07/2020 22:53, Andrew Hughes wrote:
>
> On 08/07/2020 18:56, Zhengyu Gu wrote:
>>
>>> I already backported this:
>>>
>>> https://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk8u-dev/2020-April/011526.html
>>>
>>> In the end, we decided not to go ahead with this and workaround it for
>>> JDK-8076475:
>>>
>>> https://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk8u-dev/2020-April/011539.html
>>
>> At that time, this was *not* a parity backport, but now, it is. Should
>> we reconsider it?
>
> To my mind, that doesn't really change anything from a technical
> standpoint, but I'll leave the final say to Andrew Haley.

Hmm. Once strdup() has failed, the whole program is basically dead in
the water, and throwing an OutOfMemoryError only delays the
inevitable. It might even be argued that a VM error is more
informative than an OutOfMemoryError, because then the problem doesn't
look like heap exhaustion.

The fact that this is now a parity backport does swing me more to
saying "yes", but this is an extensive change and that makes me
nervous, so I'm leaning towards "no". I am aware that I'm swithering
here, but it's a genuine dilemma: neither course of action is great.

-- 
Andrew Haley  (he/him)
Java Platform Lead Engineer
Red Hat UK Ltd. <https://www.redhat.com>
https://keybase.io/andrewhaley
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