Archive for January, 2008

Crash

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

Well this is a first – I’ve had to roll back a JDK update to the previous version due to crashing. Luckily I always keep the previous version in case I need to roll back but never have; I install the binary JDK into (in this case) /usr/local/jdk1.6.0_04 and symlink this to /usr/local/jdk so I don’t need to change my path. So it was a simple matter to symlink to /usr/local/jdk1.6.0_03 and the problem went away.

The problem was that Eclipse started crashing recently and I blamed Eclipse and/or a bad plugin or combination of plugins instead of the JDK upgrade. So I reinstalled Eclipse, cleared out the workspace/.metadata caches, re-installed plugins a few at a time, re-imported projects and nothing – still crashed regularly. Big ugly JDK crashes with hs_err_pid.log files full of stuff like

#
# An unexpected error has been detected by Java Runtime Environment:
#
#  SIGSEGV (0xb) at pc=0x00002b4516f0722a, pid=28013, tid=1085491536
#
# Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (10.0-b19 mixed mode linux-amd64)
# Problematic frame:
# V  [libjvm.so+0x1f122a]
#
# If you would like to submit a bug report, please visit:
#   http://java.sun.com/webapps/bugreport/crash.jsp
# The crash happened outside the Java Virtual Machine in native code.
# See problematic frame for where to report the bug.
#

I did some Googling but this is a new problem and only seems to affect 64-bit JDKs, so there’s not much discussion going on. One guy mentioned that adding “-client” to eclipse.ini helped, but not for me. Turns out that there is no client JVM for 64-bin Linux (or Windows) JDKs (see the discussion here).

So this morning I switched back to u3 and everything seems to work fine now.

I’m also running Kubuntu on my shiny new workstation at my shiny new job and had the same problem, but didn’t have the previous install to revert to. Luckily though Sun keeps archived previous versions and I was able to download u3 here.

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