Valerie,
I'd like to re-visit the initialization of the parallel-capable loaders
[1]. Currently the set of parallel-capable loader types is created by
ClassLoader's initializer. That works today but is a bit fragile in that
any changes or fixes that cause ClassLoader to be initialized earlier in
the VM startup could cause problems. For example, if ClassLoader were to
be initialized earlier then adding the initial element will cause a weak
reference to be created and that will NPE in the Reference's initializer
as the main thread isn't in a thread group at that point. All code that
executes before the system classes are fully initialized requires great
care so for this one, I think the simplest thing would be to delay the
initialization unless the first loader is created. Does that seem
reasonable? I've put a webrev with the proposed changes here:
http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~alanb/6902010/webrev.00/
For testing, I've been using the tests in
test/java/lang/ClassLoader/deadlock.
Thanks,
Alan.
[1] http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk7/tl/jdk/rev/45ff1a9d4edb
