RFR: JDK-8187498: Add a -Xmanagement flag as syntactic sugar for -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.* properties

[Alan Bateman]

On 07/02/2018 09:19, Harsha Wardhana B wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> After internal discussions, below format for management flags was 
> agreed upon.
>
> 1. --start-management-agent port=1234,ssl=on        (space seperator)
> or
> 2. --start-management-agent=port=1234,ssl=on        ('=' seperator)
>
> If option 1 is specified, it will be converted to option 2 by the java 
> launcher before it is passed onto VM.
>
> With above GNU long format for management options, specifying 
> arguments is mandatory unlike before.
>
> --start-management-agent will not be recognized in the current format 
> and hence will not default to --start-management-agent=local=true.
`--start-management-agent <value>` make sense and it wouldn't be hard to 
introduce `--start-local-management-agent` if really needed.

One point that needs discussion is whether the <value> needs something, 
maybe an agent name or kind, to make it clear what agent should be 
started. Today we have a JMX management agent, Oracle JDK downloads 
additionally have a SNMP management agent. There are several 3rd party 
exporters. If AgentProvider were promoted to an exported package then it 
would make this pluggibility a lot cleaner and would mean the 
--start-management-agent could specify the agent name/kind without 
needing hacks or forwarding by the JMX agent.

-Alan