Attaching to a JVM image that does not include java.instrument

[Michael Rasmussen]

On 19 May 2017 at 11:22, Alan Bateman <Alan.Bateman at oracle.com> wrote:
> One thing that jlink
> could do is emit a warning that the resulting run-time image doesn't have
> the management and instrumentation features, might that be the right
> balance.

As a users of those kind of agents, and as an agent vendor myself
(though not one I expect to be used often with jlink'ed images - but
how app servers in the future are distributed remains to be seen) I
get where Rafael is coming from. I also agree it will come to a
surprise to many, that if suddenly the distributed image from a
vendor, now created by jlink, no longer included the capability of
attaching agents!

Having serviceability/agent support included by default makes sense to
me, but I also get the reverse argument, that you should be able to
create a minimalvm/java.base image, if so desired.

I most definitely think, that jlink should at least emit a warning, if
the image it's generating does not include those features, and also
have the warning include information how to add these features.
A dedicated option for jlink to explicitly enable/disable
serviceability/agent modules could be nice for that.

/Michael