Is it possible to resurrect sa-jdi?

[Alan Bateman]

On 05/09/2018 11:25, Egor Ushakov wrote:
> Hi,
>
> suddenly at Jetbrains we realized that sa pid attach may be useful. 
> Unfortunately sun.jvm.hotspot.jdi* was removed in jdk 9.
> We would like to resurrect sa-jdi in our jdk fork. As I can see the 
> agent is still there, so it should be feasible.
> Do you see any issues with that? Should we go in that direction or is 
> it a dead end?
>
There were discussions here in 2016 (and I think further back) about 
SA-JDI and whether it was actually used. I don't recall anyone 
responding or objecting at the time, probably because most developers 
would never attach a java debugger to a core file or hung VM. Have you 
seen significant usage from IntelliJ users? Are these users diagnosing 
VM crashes or other JDK bugs?

As regards creating your own JDI connectors and transport then it should 
be feasible but it would rely on an undocumented and non-exported API. 
You would need to compile and run with --add-exports option to export 
the packages to whatever module contains the connectors for example.

-Alan