All gtests are executed within the same process (with the exception of death tests). The first test marked as TEST_VM will initialize to VM. Subsequent tests will run with the VM initialized. That behavior has disadvantages:

- a TEST may not run properly if the VM had been initialized, eg when testing facilities which are used by concurrent VM internal threads (see JDK-8254042).

- a TEST may be using VM facilities without realizing, and either should not do that or should be a TEST_VM; that error is hidden if some other tests already initialized the VM

- VM initialization may be faulty, and may crash the VM; still one would like to execute the non-VM tests first to see their results.

It would be better if we would execute the non-VM tests before those requiring a VM.