Name: nl37777 Date: 04/19/2004

The new JVMTI SPI function Agent_OnLoad receives an
options string. The specification of Agent_OnLoad does not specify the
character encoding used for Agent_OnLoad, and parts of the
implementation disagree on the character encoding.

Agent_OnLoad receives the options from the command line through the JNI
function JNI_CreateJavaVM. This function has traditionally received the
options in platform encoding, and the specification is being updated
under 4915107 to clarify this. However, the agents that provide the
JDWP backend and the java.lang.instrument SPI interpret the option
string as modified UTF-8, either by matching them against signatures
obtained from functions such as GetClassSignature or by converting them
to String objects using NewStringUTF.

The character encoding for the Agent_OnLoad options string needs to be
clearly specified, and the necessary character conversions added to
ensure that the options are interpreted correctly in all cases.
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Name: nl37777 Date: 04/30/2004

A related problem exists for four functions provided in
the JVMTI API:
     GetSystemProperty
     SetSystemProperty
     GetSystemProperties
     AddToBootstrapClassLoaderSearch
These functions assume that the strings that they accept or return are
encoded in platform encoding. This is not documented, and in any case
it would be better if these methods used the same encoding as all other
JVMTI interfaces, that is, modified UTF-8.


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