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Oracle's Java Company Change Breaks Eclipse
crabel writes "In Java 1.6.0_21, the company field was changed from 'Sun Microsystems, Inc' to 'Oracle.' Apparently not the best idea, because some applications depend on that field to identify the virtual machine. All Eclipse versions since 3.3 (released 2007) until and including the recent Helios release (2010) have been reported to crash with an OutOfMemoryError due to this change. This is particularly funny since the update is deployed through automatic update and suddenly applications cease to work."
Oracle's pet linux is branded "Unbreakable"...
How is this Oracle's problem?
s/make me make/made me make/
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
This is a critical flaw in the "pay once, own forever" software model. If the company that supplied your app uses this field, assumes it'll never change, and then goes out of business or move on to different products, you're in big trouble right now. You've got to pay for support, or your vendor might not be there when you need them in a situation like this.
Should they?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Sounds normal to me.
I am beating myself over the head until I forget all programming languages. There is not a single programming culture left that I can identify with. :(
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
Ladies and gentlemen, I call you attention to Exhibit A for the real world consequences of poor design decisions.
Poor planning. Eclipse should not use a 'company' field to be pulling key VM info from. And there should be another more particular way to acquire VM information applications require. That was a poorly thought out situation from the get-go, but Oracle was mightily short sighted for making this change without much testing of compatible apps. Mind you, it isn't their fault as such, but pissing off all of those using Eclipse is mightily retarded. While we're on the subject of retarded, automatic updates? You deserve what you get if you trust those. You should be damn sure an update is solid, stable, and won't give you a BOHICA experience before you apply it. No sympathy for auto-update users.... that's just bad planning as well. So: Oracle: Minor thumbs down. Eclipse devs: Thumbs up overall (except for bloating), but thumbs down for this one. Auto-update Users: Not bothering with a thumb, too busy ROFLMAO.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
The real title should be "Enterprise Software Breaks when Oracle Changes Name."
Thick-client software that relies on a branding for string comparisons or regular expressions (I don't know which it is)? Hum.
(I say "thick-client" because "thin-client" ... or, hosted ... is a lot easier to push updates for :) )
I can remember trying to install programs to D:\ rather than C:\ - That caused no end of problems due to developers hard coding in and just assuming that windows and themselves would be installed on the conventional C: That anyone would ever use any other drive letter didn't seem to occur to them. If I remember correctly this happened to me with a version of matlab (or something in that family).
jaymz
Tangentially related, what does the following do:
doItRecursively(doWhatIWant()) { return doItRecursively(doItFaster(doWhatIWant()); }
I'm guessing it does it instantaneously...or never.
I don't know why they're blaming Oracle. This is clearly a fuck-up made by the Eclipse developers.
If any other piece of software checked the platform it was running on and didn't handle unexpected cases properly, it wouldn't be the platform developer's fault. The blame would rest solely with the application developer.
I seem to remember some applications not fully working with Blackdown and possibly others facing some breakage with other JVMs. So while it's stupid to rely on the vendor field in general, I can sort of understand why they'd examine it for purposes of compatibility. It goes both ways.
Let's just blame everyone and get it over with.
He who has no
They already released a fix, with the original "Sun Microsystems" embedded in the exe on Monday. WTF, was this posted by kdawson? The FUD is strong in this one.
I remember seeing "how to" articles for various languages there to determine the drive the app is on, and the drive and directory where Windows is. Programmers who didn't learn from these things were ignorant.
From the guy who proposed the fix in the triage meeting, "It's only a one-line change."
that they'd test, it'd be Eclipse.
Oracle, why didn't you just operate Sun as a subsidiary and brand instead of trying to merge it all in?
Something along the lines of looking in %windir% rather than c:\windows. Not really that difficult.
Yes and no. While it's not the best practice to rely on some field assuming it'll forever remain static, if you read the bug report in TFA (surprise, surprise), you'll find this:
So, the reason they examine it in the first place is to know whether or not they need to set specific values that are supported by the Sun/Oracle JVM. It's not optimal, but I can't exactly fault them for that.
He who has no
If this "broke" Eclipse, than it was already broken. Running out of memory because a string is not as expected?
I don't get it. Why would you design the VM to have a fixed size address space in the first place? Anybody here remember the reason? And how come there is no standard option to change that size so Eclipse has to resort to platform-specific hacks to do it? 128M ought to be enough for everybody, I guess...
A lot of nerds would be broken too.
Also Goatse is now kown as the Oracle of the Open Anus.
Write once, run nowhere?
I wouldn't even think that that would be the Java IDE they'd be most likely to test -- I would pick NetBeans for that.
I mean, saying that if they were going to test one app on a new Java update it would be NetBeans is like saying if Microsoft was going to test one app on a Windows update it would be iTunes.
To Oracle's credit, when Eclipse dev's reported the issue (http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6969236) Oracle immediately reverted the change within 2 days (http://hg.openjdk.java.net/hsx/hsx17/baseline/annotate/1771222afd14/make/hotspot_distro). They could have argued that it was Eclipse's fault for depending on the value in the first place and that rebranding their VM is something they should be allowed to do. But they put the best interest of other applications first. Still, it raises an issue that no one has really bothered with before. There are many Hostpot "vendor specific" options that are very commonly used. Almost every large application would configure heap sizes. There should be a standardized mechanism to define these options and thus avoid these very problems.
Ignoring the 'one line change', does it seem appropriate that changing a company string should cause an "Out of memory" error? I realize the OOM error happened about 8 stack frames later but I mean, seriously ?
Yeah but #33063012
Say it right: "Nuc-le-ah Powah".
People actually trust automatic updates? I have to admit I find that rather humorous...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Look again, I most certainly am NOT fucking you!
Lemme guess, you're sweating bullets wondering if you're going to spend all night pissing on fires while the C guys laugh at you and drink beer?
I'm having trouble understanding why someone would code an application in a widely implemented language like Java, yet check for the vendor of the VM. It would make more sense to check availability of specific libraries or what have you, wouldn't it?
I don't program and even I know better than that. Sheesh.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
may windows apps are stuck in the 9x system with witting to there own folder and little to no per user stuff.
Oracle doing the right thing for the right reason, AND getting credit for it.. Who would have imagined?
Was that a pig i just saw fly by my window?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Read the bug. It's not the heap or the stack that is running out of memory (something that is completely within the developer's control), it's the space the VM uses internally for storing class definitions. All big apps( ie those with a lot of classes) that use Sun's VM have to configure the permanent generation space size or they hit this issue. As this configuration is vendor specific and eclipse is designed to support multiple VM vendors, the only way to tell if the custom Sun -XX option should be set is the company name. I agree with the previous commentator, this is a flaw in Java:
"There are many Hostpot "vendor specific" options that are very commonly used. Almost every large application would configure heap sizes. There should be a standardized mechanism to define these options and thus avoid these very problems."
And I mean from within the VM too.
BTW: java -X which is suppose to give you a listing of non-standard options doesn't include all of the Sun / Oracles options so you can't even uses that...
Because Open Source software never breaks.
It's understandable that they might not want to run on just anybody's Java. For that matter, they might have only tested on a particular version. I haven't looked into it, but it seems likely there's a standard API to check Java's version. It seems like the proper way to address this is to pop up something that says, "This is Java vX.Y from company Foo, we haven't tested with it so it may not work. Conntinue? (button) Do not show this dialog again (checkbox)".
Plainly, whatever they did that caused an "out of memory" error was quite a goof.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I like that approach. Then I can forget about who I was supposed to blame!
He who has no
LOL, I used to have windows on my D: drive (in d:\winnt), and my C: drive was my CD-ROM.
i can't tell you how many times my CD tray would open followed shortly by some poorly written piece of crap crashing.
Actually, it was a great idea to change the company field since it maintained accuracy.
The problem is the apps that were poorly coded and assumed that Java would be owned by Sun for the next thousand years. They deserved to break.
Shh! Don't tell Oracle that the uname command returns SunOS, or all hell will break loose.
The obsession with removing the Sun name from everything is petty in the extreme, to say nothing of tacking Oracle on where inappropriate, ie. Oracle Solaris. It as if Larry were a kid who felt the need to stamp his name on all of his possessions.
The application shouldn't crash with OutOfMemoryError. If such a change causes *that* error, there is SOME flaw in the software design. Now, it is somewhat easy to understand that the developers didn't believe they should anticipate this kind of a problem... But somewhere in their code there is a missing "throws WeThoughtThisWouldNeverHappenAndAreVerySorryException" line.
Sadly enough the worst one for me was Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl. I had XP Pro on my D: drive and I think C: was my Vista drive. I was gaming in XP as I was having issues with Vista and punkbuster. Every time I tried to save in Stalker, it would try to write the files to the Vista drive and it wouldn't be able to as XP didn't have ownership of the file system.
I remember talking to their tech support and they seemed to not understand what I was talking about. That was a rather frustrating phone call....
"the company field was changed" .... "crash with an OutOfMemoryError".
Why should changing the name of a company cause an out-of-memory error? That's just bad usability. What's the user going to assume form this; "I need more memory", which is not truly the root cause of the problem.
This is just one example of common problems with software today; the error messages often do not accurately identify the root cause of the problem. These days I'm a user, not a programmer (although I have done some very simple programming in the distant past), and this sort of thing really bugs me as a user. Uninformative or innaccurate error messages serve absolutely no purpose.
- James
Java is no better than Visual Basic, where the JRE is just a big VB runtime. But slower. And buggier. And fatter. And it's not the panacea that Sun made it out to be. I'm not impressed by Sun's promises, JRE dependencies, the huge meaningless dumps when an error occurs, and that frickin' garbage collection. I'm a recipient of apps that are bug-laden due to devs using class libs that they can't debug and fix. Instead of writing something that they know works, they'll grab some reusable class that shouldn't be reused, but something new and appropriate should have been coded instead. "Run anywhere" is "Runs mostly" in my production environment, and it's BS. Fanboys can bury this all they want, but I'm not impressed by Sun's promises. Reusable my ass.
Don't forget the NEC PC-98 that put hard drives on A: and B:.
Yet another reason why intertwining the physical and logical arrangement of storage was a dumb idea. Microsoft really needs to ditch the whole "drive letter" concept and move to a single file system tree a la unix.
Monstar L
640 letters otta be good enough for anyone
-Gill Bates
Table-ized A.I.
I don't know whether to call you sadist, masochist, psychotic, or just truly adventurous.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
Yes, Microsoft should license Veritas technology and add another layer of abstraction into the whole operating system function.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
There are lots of GC'd languages which don't have this problem.
You're an uninformed idiot. Just saying ;).
It's true, you shouldn't detect browsers based on user-agent.
But then, the other ways aren't terribly reliable. I remember, once upon a time, trying to find "The Right Way" to deliver XHTML with an XML mime type for browsers capable of it, and as HTML for everyone else.
There isn't a right way.
The closest I got was the Accept header. The problem here is that every single browser out there sends a */*, because every browser can accept downloads. At the time, I remember one browser (can't remember which, maybe Safari) sent a */* and nothing else -- while others sent a string explicitly mentioning a few and assigning priorities to them.
The problem was, there wasn't any way for me to specify my preference on the server side, and there certainly wasn't a good way for a browser to say what it natively supports, what it can open in external programs, and what it can only download and bother the user about. All I could do is follow the browser's own preferences, and feed it whatever it ranked highest -- and even then, I'd have to prefer text/html (even though I really prefer application/xhtml+xml) for those browsers which don't specify preferring html to */*, but really don't support xhtml...
At the end of the day, my options were pretty much to either stop caring about the standards, or interpret them in a very non-standard way, or use User-Agent detection, or just give up and serve it as text/html.
And that's just getting the thing to render. It only gets messier from there...
So yes, it's my fault, as a web developer, that I might fall back on user-agent detection -- and, in particular, I'm likely to detect IE so I can work around some of its many deficiencies. It's also the fault of the standards for not defining clearer ways to negotiate capabilities. It's also the fault of browsers for not following what standards do exist.
I certainly try to avoid browser detection and focus on feature detection, as you suggest. But your blanket statement, like many blanket statements, is just wrong.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The parent post is *NOT* a troll... At best, offtopic, since it didn't actually answer the GP's question, but it's definitely not a troll.
Microsoft really needs to ditch the whole "drive letter" concept and move to a single file system tree a la unix.
Windows has had "proper" mount point technology since Windows 2000. DOS has "subst" (path as drive) and assign (drive as path.) NT4 has "subst" but not "assign".
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Someone in our company ran into this several weeks ago, and I had kind of a fun time tracking down the problem. The summary and most of the comments are missing a lot of details and nuance, which actually make this problem kind of interesting.
1) It wasn't even running out of memory
Sun/Oracle's VM implementation (HotSpot) has a concept of a permanent generation, which is separate from the rest of the heap and has its own maximum size. This generation holds stuff like the code cache and interned strings. Whether or not this is a good concept is debatable, and as far as I know, they are planning to do away with it in the future as JRockit and HotSpot merge. At any rate, this is the space that was filling up. This probably didn't happen very quickly on a normal Eclipse distribution, but with a lot of plugins installed (and thus a lot of classes being loaded) it crashed pretty quickly.
2) This is only because of somewhat subtle differences between the various VMs
HotSpot is the only major JVM I know of that has a PermGen space - J9 (IBM) and JRockit (Oracle, via BEA) don't have this concept. Thus the requirement to be able to behave differently based on which VM you are using. Being able to behave properly on multiple VMs is especially important for Eclipse because not only do they have a lot of people using it on HotSpot, but because it is the basis for IBM's RAD, they have a ton of people using it on J9 as well.
3) This problem is in the launcher, not Eclipse itself
So, the crux of the problem is that Eclipse needs to start a VM, and has to know the proper flags to pass to it *before* it starts up. A few people have suggested trying reflection or other runtime methods as a better way to solve this, but this ignores a) Once the VM has started up, you can't change the heap or PermGen sizes, and b) As far as I know, there is no way to query the VM at runtime to figure out what its underlying heap structure looks like - that is an implementation detail.
So, while it does kind of suck that Eclipse was relying on a vendor name, it is trickier to solve than it appears at first glance. The only really graceful ways I can think of to solve this problem rely on some changes to the VM spec.
Its not a proper mount point, its almost a proper mount point, a lot of bugs appear if you use it, atleast in XP and win2003.
I believe it was the same developer who checked for "Dr Dos" when installing windows...
Yes. not to mention some (many, a lot) developers assuming the OS is installed in English and all the directory names are in the same language. I've had my share of problems between "C:\Program Files" and "C:\Archivos de Programa"... to give an example.
One enterprise software I needed to install was able to install itself on other drives than C: but the installer checked the available diskspace from C:. The software in question took around 5Gb of space and when my C: did not have enough I was unable to install to D: until I cleared enough space to C:
So, it looks like
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
If Oracle can take months to announce to the whole world they are merging java.sun.com, bigAdmin etc into one dull clunky diagram, why was there no warning of any sort given that we are dealing with the java implementation now.
I hate Oracle, their desire is replace anything *sun*. I remember when Sun acquired MySql, you could hardly tell an acquisition has happened. I sure hate Oracle.
When my Sun VirtualBox application asked me to upgrade recently to version 3.2.6, I thought nothing of it; sure, always good to stay up to date, right? It proceeded without a hitch, although the only difference seemed to be that the branding had been changed from "Sun Microsystems Inc." to "Oracle" along with some corporate artwork. Was that all? Apparently not. Afterwards, several Linux distros refused to install as virtual machines: somewhere half-way, the process would report a generic failure. Strange, because I had installed the same distros many times before (at least the older VMs I had of them were still working). So, suspecting a bug, I downgraded back to v3.1.8 r61349 and the problem vanished. Pretty weird for what's ostensibly just a cosmetic change. At any rate, I feel this does not bode well for the future of VirtualBox and I've already been looking into the alternatives; perhaps something a little less dependent on some corporate overlord will be a safer choice.
Not an Oracle issue.
1) Bad programming by Eclipse
2) Its a win only issue, therefore
"Won't Fix ." Closed.
1311393600 - Back to Black
Not only that, but some windows folders were translated in other languages. For example, "Program Files" was "Archivos de Programa" in Spanish.
Some programs insisted on installing themselves on "C:\Program Files", regardless of the actual folder used by Windows (the translated one).
The result of that was that the non English people used to have 2 types of "program files" folders, one in English (full of crappy apps) and other localized in their language.
FYI - Oracle's OSM7 product (Order and Service Management for Telcos) uses Eclipse - and there's no plans to migrate it to JDeveloper. So why the hell would Oracle chop its nose off to spite its face?
Its not a proper mount point, its almost a proper mount point, a lot of bugs appear if you use it, atleast in XP and win2003.
Bugs in the OS, or bugs in incorrectly written applications?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Thank you Oracle you are taking the way to restore the places of all of us, C/C++ coders, demonstrating that cheap and pseudo(=scripting) programming languages on VM hyper-eavy-overload are NOT always the solution... Not talking about internet, browsers and jscript as if the Internet is a Global computer and client browsers as Window Managers. This is insane waste of today's powerfull and precious CPU cycles, just to save money.
I am actually developing a complete Integrated solution for customers and requests support system that hooks on a (distant)controler - All written in C/C++. If crashes occur it is MY fault! not the C/C++ compiler. btw, I see Garbage collectors like
our SAAQ ( Société de l'Assurance Automobile du Québec ) where drivers crashes and kill people without beeing responsible of their stupid and dangerous incompetences ( no-fault law )
Thank you for "reading" , make me feel better now :-)
It's funny to see how you can render all that portability and platform-agnosticism useless with only one "if".
Same thing happend to me, it was giving spacegen , outofmemory error all of a sudden and eclipse would crash.... I almost wasted 4hrs to find out the problem..
Yes.
Works fine for me, jdk1.6.0_21 eclipse 3.6 (Helios) on LINUX! (CentOS 5.2). Must just affect those worthless Windoze boxes.
Hum... dont look at the symptoms, look at the cause... maybe a JVM CAPABILITY JSR should solve the issue....
[]s, gandhi
It's not even "back in the day", Gears of War for PC refused to install anywhere other than the default directory, even when I explicitly gave it a new directory.
Quite a lot of software development tools and build scripts also broke when Richard Stallman changed the gcc target "i386-pc-linux" to "i386-pc-linux-gnu". GCC development had long since been taken over by other people but RMS just had to commit his little political agenda to the build, and broke a lot of builds in the process. Same thing here.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Launch your copy of Eclipse like so:
This will override the eclipse launcher's default set of JVM arguments with a custom set. The MaxPermSize is the issue. If the eclipse launcher can't identify the JVM, then it doesn't know to specify a larger permanent generation size for the Sun/Oracle JVM.
To those people saying that this was a lousy design decision by the Eclipse devs:
Since a nonstandard switch is required at launch by the JVM, the only way to know what set of switches to pass is to query the JVM vendor string. It's not a clean solution, but it's a solution dictated by the platform.
This is typical of Oracle's acquisitions. Not only do they rewrite licensing agreements, they have to go an re-brand all the code. We are running lots of Tangosol Coherence instances. When Oracle bought Tangosol out, we had to change the way we deploy nodes to avoid blowing our costs up. Oracle loves node/cpu licensing.
Ever tried OCFS2? Oracle deserves to be shot just for that.
The easiest (though certainly not the most elegant) way to get this to work is to have both drives formatted as NTFS then set 'D:' to mount to C:\Program Files (you can do this via Disk Management in the MMC)
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
May be people who do not know about the java -xm ( Extended Memory Option ) could have reported this.