RFR 8009302: JVM crash on infinite recursion on Appkit Thread

[Gerard Ziemski]

Thank you for the review and the support and for pushing me to answer 
all the little details - I enjoyed this investigation and learned a lot.


cheers

On 6/5/2013 3:37 AM, David Holmes wrote:
> A big thumbs up from me Gerard! The investigation you did here was 
> outstanding!
>
> I nominate you to look into the stackoverflow issues reported against 
> Linux ;-)
>
> Thanks,
> David
>
> On 5/06/2013 4:34 AM, Gerard Ziemski wrote:
>> hi guys,
>>
>> Here is a trivial fix (workaround) for a particular XNU (Mac OS X
>> kernel) behavior causing JavaVM problems.
>>
>> Explanation:
>>
>> There is a case where XNU will map SIGBUS into SIGSEGV, which only
>> happens on main thread (secondary threads receive the original SIGBUS)
>> due to the way XNU determines stack address and its size. To complicate
>> the issue, XNU will only deliver that converted SIGSEGV signal if the
>> BSD signal catcher uses an alternate stack.
>>
>> Since JavaVM BSD signal catcher does not use alt stack, we end up
>> missing the signal and the Java process results in a native crash which
>> is then presented to the user via Mac CrashReporter app.
>>
>> We do not want to use an actual alternate stack, which among other
>> things would result in an increased RAM usage and possibly result in a
>> regression, so we use a workaround, where we declare we will use an
>> alternate stack, without actually creating one.
>>
>> This workaround is only for Mac (ie. we use #ifdef __APPLE__) and it
>> works because we install our own guard pages, and that's where the
>> faulting address occurs, so we are assured that our stack does have
>> enough room to handle the signal by the existing JavaVM code, which
>> removes the guard pages before handling the signal.
>>
>> I have filed an issue with Apple (id: 14047928) to fix this inconsistent
>> (wrt threads) behavior in XNU, and wrote native tests that check for
>> this particular behavior, which will catch any future change, should
>> Apple ever elect to fix it.
>>
>>
>> Testing:
>>
>> - the issue's own use case
>> - vm.quick.testlist
>> - vm.signal.testlist
>> - nsk.stack.testlist
>> - JPRT
>> - JCK lang
>> - JCK vm
>>
>>
>> References:
>>
>> Webrev: http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~hseigel/bug_8009302/
>>
>> OpenJDK bug  http://bugs.sun.com/view_bug.do?bug_id=8009302
>>
>> JBS bug: https://jbs.oracle.com/bugs/browse/JDK-8009302
>>
>