There are a bunch of places in error reporting that check Universe::is_fully_initialized() and print something from a subsystem like Metaspace or Universe::heap() or CodeCache that should ask specifically if that subsystem is initialized enough to print the information in the step.

Advice from stefank: Be mindful about VMError::print_vm_info, which is used by jcmd VM.info. We need to be more careful with that one, compared to the real crash code.