[jira] [Updated] (BCEL-267) Race conditions on static fields in BranchHandle and InstructionHandle

["Stephan Herrmann (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

     [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/BCEL-267?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:all-tabpanel ]

Stephan Herrmann updated BCEL-267:
----------------------------------
    Attachment: BCEL267--Race-conditions-on-static-fields-in-BranchH.patch

I finally found the time to create a test case that effectively triggers the problem (see attached patch).

The core issue is: two threads with no shared data create an instruction list each, and add lots of instructions to their respective list. After some random - but not very big - number of iterations, one of the instruction lists will be corrupt, having a next or prev pointer pointing into the other list, which can surface with one of 3 possible symptoms:
- NullPointerException in {{InstructionList.getInstructionHandles(..)}}
- instruction list does not contain the expected instructions
- instruction list has corrupt link structure: {{ih.getNext().getPrev() != ih}}

Re-run the test several times to see all three symptoms (it may even randomly succeed, but that should be rare).

While running other tests I observed a ClassCastException in org.apache.bcel.PLSETestCase.testB262() even on unmodified sources.

Given that the entire business of the bogusly shared {{ih_list}} and {{bh_list}} is performance optimization I took a quick look at the output of {{PerformanceTest}} but difference looked like normal white noise, i.e.: no indication at a performance regression due to the fix.


> Race conditions on static fields in BranchHandle and InstructionHandle
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: BCEL-267
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/BCEL-267
>             Project: Commons BCEL
>          Issue Type: Bug
>          Components: Main
>    Affects Versions: 5.2
>            Reporter: Stephan Herrmann
>         Attachments: BCEL267--Race-conditions-on-static-fields-in-BranchH.patch
>
>
> I have observed race conditions causing NullPointerException like this
> {code}java.lang.NullPointerException
>         at org.apache.bcel.generic.InstructionList.getInstructionHandles(InstructionList.java:1021)
>         at org.apache.bcel.generic.InstructionList.findHandle(InstructionList.java:141)
>         at org.apache.bcel.generic.MethodGen.<init>(MethodGen.java:194)
> {code}
> In the debugger I could verify that concurrent access to the fields {{BranchHandle.bh_list}} or {{InstructionHandle.ih_list}} can cause corruption of those lists.
> I succeeded to make the exception less frequent by adding synchronized blocks, but still the exception could be observed. I concluded that for safe protection the fields would need to be made volatile, which in the end might actually defeat their original purpose of optimization.
> I have since then run with a patched version of BCEL, where those static fields were simply removed and new Handles were created on every request. This variant finally was free of the race condition.
> Seeing activity towards a 6.0 release, I'd appreciate if this change could be incorporated.
> The original bug tracking my experiments can be found in Eclipse bugzilla: https://bugs.eclipse.org/344350
> The modified classes (based on 5.2) can be found here:
> - http://git.eclipse.org/c/objectteams/org.eclipse.objectteams.git/tree/plugins/org.eclipse.objectteams.otre/bcelpatchsrc/org/apache/bcel/generic



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