It would be very useful to provide a jtreg policy option that did not override the system policy file (JRE/lib/security/java.policy). In this way, the system policy would still be parsed, and code would be granted the permissions in the default policy file included in the JRE.

When using the current policy option, the test developer often has to duplicate the system policy grant statements in their own test policy file, especially if the test uses standard extensions that require additional permissions. This is a common cause of confusion to developers, since this is not the default behavior when the test is run outside of jtreg with a SecurityManager.

Adding this option will also help avoid duplicating the permission grants in test policy files as we work on reducing the permissions granted to standard extensions from AllPermission to only those that they need. See: http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/core-libs-dev/2014-April/026575.html