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Java 7 Ships With Severe Bug
Lisandro writes "Lucid Imagination just posted an announcement about a severe bug in the recently released Java 7. Apparently some loops are mis-compiled due to errors in the HotSpot compiler optimizations, which causes programs to fail. This bug affects several Apache projects directly — Apache Lucene Core and Apache Solr have already raised a warning, noting that the bug might be present in Java 6 as well."
So well known for product "quality"
Or is it only a desktop problem?
The bikini - security through obscurity since 1943
He was a fail troll yet got multiple people to fall for it? It's amazing how easy it is for people like the GP to continue to bait people with such obvious trolling.
Relevant part:
These problems were detected only 5 days before the official Java 7 release,
so Oracle had no time to fix those bugs, affecting also many more
applications. In response to our questions, they proposed to include the
fixes into service release u2 (eventually into service release u1, see [6]).
This means you cannot use Apache Lucene/Solr with Java 7 releases before
Update 2! If you do, please don't open bug reports, it is not the
committers' fault! At least disable loop optimizations using the
-XX:-UseLoopPredicate JVM option to not risk index corruptions.
If this was known before the release and it's as severe as it's being made out to be, why the hell didn't they postpone the release? It's not like the world is dependent on Java 7 being released on time.
This isn't a little issue, either. It's extremely irresponsible for Oracle to put this kind of release out knowing of a bug this severe without any kind of warning on it.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Damn those bugs where known but Oracle choose to ship Java 7, knowing that it would crash on some very known and used Apache libraries. (And most likely other code too).
To quote:
"These problems were detected only 5 days before the official Java 7 release,
so Oracle had no time to fix those bugs, affecting also many more. "
Here is a hint to Oracle: If you find a fatal bug 5 days before launch and don't have time to fix it, you either disable the specific optimization with the know bug, or you postpone the launch and start working on a fix. Just shipping like this is stupid.
And I was only avoiding updating it because the last time our PCs were clamoring for Java updates it was actually a (well disguised) trojan.
The next thing Windows needs to add is a "don't bother me with this update" API where software vendors need to ask the OS permission before prompting the user for updates - and also allow preference settings like "don't install a damn desktop launch icon when you update" (looking at you Adobe.) Personally, I'd set my preferences to "don't tell me about updates until they are at least a month old." There is a balance to strike between getting the latest patches for security and waiting until a patch has proven itself in the wild.
Of course, we could all just stop using software from vendors who don't do these things voluntarily (like check for bugs before pushing an update, or making an easy to access preference for launch icon settings (hint: if I've deleted the last 12 of them, I likely don't want the 13th!) but the software that I'm talking about here is Java and Acrobat - kind of hard to get around the web without those.
over the seabreeze whipping past his yacht (not that he'd give a fsck about you, anyway).
You may think that the joke was obvious, but today is System Administrator Day. People who don't know that difference (or the difference between a CPU and hard drive, for that matter) is what sysadmins deal with every day. Nine times out of ten when users ask a really stupid question it's because they really don't know.
You would probably think I was joking if I told you that a user was worried because his java had a hot spot. The joke would be on you.
Frankly, upgrading to the latest version of your development environment, literally on the day of release, seems to be rather poor practice. Since "there are a lot of places for things to break," adding another one is unwise.
Score 0, Informative anonymous coward.
> This bug affects several Apache projects directly — Apache Lucene Core
So... from Oracle's standpoint, it's a feature?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
a) some of these bugs where filed months ago, and yet those hotspot "optimizations" are still on by default
b) it's true that some problems can be avoided by deliberately disabling these optimizations, but w/o raising big warning alarms to users, people aren't going to know they need to go out of their way to do that. For crash bugs, it may not be so bad -- they see the crash and google to find out why it crashed. For miss-evaluation of loops that can lead to silent data corruption it's a different story -- how would users ever know that they need to disable those options if developers don't yell and holler from the roof tops?
-- The Hoss Man
No, but if you're a sysadmin you should read release notes before making major upgrades. Not too many end-users out there using Lucene or Solr. It's also not like Sun has pushed Java 7 to end users through Java Update either (I imagine it will be quite some time before they do that).
So only the dedicated early adopters who replace what all their enterprise search software is running on with a brand-new release branch immediately after its release without reading the release notes would be affected.
Most likely it one of the following: .
1) They wrote some low level C hooks that makes the application not "pure" java.
2) They want to milk you for a new version of the software that "supports java X now"
3) They have bad programmers that don't really understand there code, there is some voodoo magic in that specific version of java is needed.
4) The company wants to assume no deviation in run time environment such to lower any support cost for there number 3 mistakes. Most likely is number 3, they just have bad programmers that are defeating the reason to code something in java in the first place.