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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."
If you're using Sun/Oracle-specific commands, you don't want to find your app running in an unofficial or unsupported Java such as Microsoft's that was eventually recalled.
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."
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.
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
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.
One reason... security. Prevents a unstable application from growing out of control, causing the whole system to start paging which with a GC becomes a diaster, dragging the whole system to a hault makign it unresponsive. So you set a heap size to "more than you'll ever need" so that it aborts if something goes wrong. There are technical advantages too. But still... I agree. The fixed heap limits are more of a pain than a benifit, especially when the default setting for the client JVM was 64MB until recently because it handnt been changed since around 1997.
Not exactly
The trouble is due to the way suns GC is designed it essentially needs to work with a limited size pool of memory. Make the pool too big and you end up with a machine that swaps instead of garbage collecting when memory gets tight under high load and/or a java app unnessacerally hogging memory other apps need. Make it too small and you get out of memory errors.
Bloatware like eclipse needs the pool set large than the default, so there is code that sets that if it sees a VM that it thinks needs it setting. The trouble is the change to the vendor string meant that the VM was no longer being identified as one that needed it.
That's my understanding of the issue anyway.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Didn't you hear, Java is the new COBOL
Let's see... you can download the JDK for free... which by definition is a 'development kit'. You can obtain a java editor at no cost. You can obtain a java IDE and debugger at no cost. Where do you get the impression that the development tools for Java require licensing, exactly?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Of course we don't live in a perfect world. C and C++ never promised "write once, run everywhere". Java did. That's why it's flawed.
Really? That's the big flaw? Java works quite well cross platform, thank you. Please try again and find some real flaws rather than the illusory ones people tried to pin on it 10 years ago.
They would have accomplished roughly the same thing, in a much more straightforward way. Instead they gave us C++ with a GC, a little different syntax, and then evolved it from there. I was, and continue to be, unimpressed.
Some of us actually think not having to manage resources like memory on an active basis to be an advantage. Fine if you don't, but snide remarks don't really impress me. Java most certainly has flaws, but you have to actually know the language and work with it to identify them, not just take a couple pot shots from comments you've heard from others.
AccountKiller
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.
Read the article! IT IS NOT A JAVA PROPERTY. It is a property of the Win32 EXE file. Eclipse' PLATFORM SPECIFIC LAUNCHER checked the setting of a PLATFORM SPECIFIC PROPERTY of a PLATFORM SPECIFIC EXECUTABLE FILE. I hate all caps. But you have to read the article.
I hate all caps.
Then use bold.
So, it looks like
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
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.