Is Caching JrtFileSystem acceptable?

[Alan Bateman]

On 02/11/2015 09:48, Jayaprakash Arthanareeswaran wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> We recently changed our code in Eclipse to support JRE 8 when loading
> classes from a Java 9 images (discussion at [1]). The change was to use a
> JrtFileSystem with a class loader. The file system is then cached and
> re-used for every request to get something from the JRE 9 images. The code
> is something like this:
>
> URL url = Paths.get(jdkHome, "jrt-fs.jar").toUri().toURL();
> URLClassLoader loader = new URLClassLoader(new URL[] { url });
> FileSystem jrt = FileSystems.newFileSystem("jrt:/", env, loader);
>
> After this change, we have started getting an NPE in the file system (We
> are randomly hitting this and at this point no idea what is causing it):
>
> Daemon Thread [Java indexing] (Suspended (exception NullPointerException))
> 	ByteArrayInputStream.<init>(byte[]) line: 106
> 	JrtFileSystem.newByteChannel(byte[], Set<OpenOption>,
> FileAttribute<?>...) line: 600
> 	JrtPath.newByteChannel(Set<OpenOption>, FileAttribute<?>...) line:
> 732
> 	JrtFileSystemProvider.newByteChannel(Path, Set<OpenOption>,
> FileAttribute<?>...) line: 218
> 	Files.newByteChannel(Path, Set<OpenOption>, FileAttribute<?>...)
> line: 361
> 	Files.newByteChannel(Path, OpenOption...) line: 407
> 	Files.readAllBytes(Path) line: 3152
>
> I have confirmed that the JrtFileSystem that is used in the above stack and
> what we cached are the same objects. And the path that is being passed in
> the beginning is a valid JrtPath. I would like to know if this is a bug in
> the file system implementation or something to do with our code.
>
> Of course, I don't have the source for JrtFileSystem, so unable to debug
> this further. Thanks for any pointers in trouble-shooting this further.
>
I'm not aware of any issues here and there shouldn't be an issue 
retaining the reference to the jrt FileSystem.

As the jrt FileSystem is in the stack trace then it means that 
Files.readAllBytes has been called with Path associated with the jrt 
file system. It's not obvious how a NPE could arise after that. The only 
thing that comes to mind is the file system being closed asynchronously, 
I can't recall how the jrt file system handles that (Sundar will know).

However, just to establish the environment - is this IBM JDK 8 or an 
Oracle/OpenJDK build of JDK 8? Also is the target image a regular JDK 9 
build or a Jigsaw build? There are changes to the jrt file system code 
in the Jigsaw forest but this is mostly to support exploded builds.

-Alan