Hi all, may I have please your opinions about the following change:
Bug: https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8223777 webrev: http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~stuefe/webrevs/8223777-posix_spawn-no-exec-error/webrev.00/webrev/ In short, since some weeks posix_spawn() is used on Linux to spawn childs. But the glibc implementation of posix_spawn does not report errors back to the caller if exec()ing the target binary fails. We only ever exec the jspawnhelper, which is part of the JDK and which then exec()s the real target binary. The second exec() is under our control and Martin did provide proper error reporting. However, the first exec(), performed inside posix_spawn(), may fail too. Most posix_spawn implementations will tell us if that happens, not glibc (it is cumbersome to implement, one needs a pipe and somesuch, and POSIX leaves a bit of headroom for the implementor to cheap out, so they did.) So, if someone messes with the JDK installation and e.g. removes the execute bits from jspawnhelper, that first exec() fails, but we get no error. From the outside it looks like Runtime.exec() succeeded. This is impossible to fix completely - see Martin's comment about the impossibility to foresee whether an exec() will succeed without actually exec()ing. But at least we can test the execute permissions on the jspawnhelper. Which this fix does. This fixes Ubuntu 16.4 (Now, I get an IOException if jspawnhelper is not executable). Since I like to be super careful with runtime.exec coding, I will run this through our nightlies and also would like feedback from the core libs people. Also, I am not sure about the runtime costs of this hack. Seems a bit excessive for something which is just a setup error (a correctly installed JDK should never have this problem). As a side note, it may help if jspawnhelper would live in the bin folder of the JDK (currently lives in lib), because everyone should be aware that programs in bin need execute permissions... Cheers, Thomas
