Wednesday August 16, 2006
Wednesday August 16, 2006
My favorite bug report
Many years ago I got assigned this bug.
It is my favorite bug report off all the ones I've ever been assigned.
This report was really impressive. A programmer at the company involved
(a dot-com victim) actually downloaded the Hotspot source and built an
instrumented jvm and got quite a lot of information about the failure.
Certainly enough info to figure out a workaround.
When I first read this report I studied the sources and thought I had
figured out the timing window that the bug exposed. I modified the jvm
to make the window larger and tried and tried to reproduce the bug to
no avail.
Well as it turns out the company reporting the bug was only about 10
miles away. So I called the developer (Justin) up and we arranged for
me to come and see the failure at their site. When I got there we were
unable to get the problem to reproduce. Probably spent most of the day
before I left. Justin promised to get it to reproduce and call me when
it happened and I'd drive back over. Well a week later he still
couldn't reproduce it.
I probably kept a workspace devoted to this bug alive for 2 or 3 years.
The bug was finally assigned to someone else and eventually closed for
being not reproducible. That was pretty disappointing given the initial
report.
We did find and fix a couple of other bugs that were similar
but none that had the symptoms as tracked down by Justin. The good news
is that the type of failure that happened in 1.3.1 isn't possible with
the changes we made to the safepointing mechanism since Java 5.0. Still it was a great bug report.
Maybe next up is my least favorite bug report?
Aug 16 2006, 04:01:59 PM EDT
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