When several HotSpot Virtual Machines run the same simple class
simultaneously, sometimes
one of that machines terminates abnormally. This failure is shown with
'Segmentation Fault - core dumped' and return code 139.

This behavior of HotSpot is shown on a machine with the following
characteristics:
|
|$uname -a
|SunOS sqeel 5.6 Generic_105181-23 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-Enterprise
|
|This is a multiprocessor machine with 8 processor units.
|
|$java -version
|java version "1.4.0-beta"
|Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.0-beta-b46)
|Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4beta-B45, mixed mode)
|
|concurrency factor (number of VMs working simultaneously): 8
|average executions before the first failure: 500

First this bug appeared in JCK build (merlin-beta) with 'dmake' and HotSpot
(build 1.4.0-beta-b46).
'dmake' ran with concurrency factor equal to 8. Factor 4 gave no failures.

To reproduce the failure on 'sqeel' use java program (Test.java) and
a shell script (stress). To run the test:
1. copy two files into current directory
2. execute ./stress 8 1000

------------------- Test.java
class Test {
    public static void main(String argv[]) {
        for (int i = 0; i < argv.length; ++i) {
        }
    }
}

------------------- stress
#!/bin/sh

#stess test for Hotspot 1.4-beta46
#
#usage:
# stress <concurrency factor> <number of tries for each concurrent
process>

echo "$*"

CONC=${1:-3}
TRIES=${2:-5}

javabin=/java/jck-dev/scratch/jdk1.4betab46/solaris/bin

echo concurrency $CONC
echo tries $TRIES
echo $javabin/java
$javabin/java -version

$javabin/javac Test.java || exit 1

while [ $CONC -gt 0 ]; do
    (
        TRY=$TRIES
        while [ $TRY -gt 0 ]; do
# echo $CONC-$TRY
            $javabin/java Test $CONC $TRY || echo error $?
            TRY=`expr $TRY - 1`
        done
    )&
    CONC=`expr $CONC - 1`
done

wait
echo Done
-----------------------------------