RFC 7038914: VM could throw uncaught OOME in ReferenceHandler thread

[Thomas Schatzl]

Hi all,

On Tue, 2013-05-07 at 12:31 +1000, David Holmes wrote:
> Catching ThreadDeath is futile. If someone is invoking stop() then you 
> can encounter the ThreadDeath anywhere and it is impossible to write 
> completely robust code in the face of such an async exception. So please 
> let's not even go there. stop() is long deprecated and should never be used.
> 
> Backing up I think the try/catch(IE|OOME) around wait() is the most 
> reasonable solution here. Anyone messing with instrumentation or 
> overriding etc can break things - so be it - don't do that. 
> StackOverflowError can also completely break many things - again it is 
> effectively an async exception and writing async-exception-safe Java 
> code is impractical if not impossible.

  I can understand this reasoning.

I provided a new patch (this time for review)
http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~tschatzl/7038914/webrev.1/ which implements
this change as suggested.

Regarding regression testing, I marked this bug as "noreg-other" with
the explanation that it is too hard to write a proper regression test,
and the note that any test would involve using methods that we don't
give any guarantees for (overriding package private jdk methods,
instrumentation).

I need reviewers and a sponsor pushing this as I don't have any role in
the jdk project, and this is a jdk only patch.

Thanks,
Thomas