Java 7 got released, but there are rumors of hotspot crashes . It's probably a tempest in a teapot, but it reminds me of the 1994 Pentium floating-point bug.
Some people are nervous about everything—killer bees, poison oak, martian
invaders, socialized medicine, you know the type. I try not to be like that.
When JDK 7 went final
yesterday, I boldly went into my .bashrc and changed
JAVA_HOME to point to jdk1.7.0. Then I read this.
So, apparently, under some conditions, Hotspot messes up. It might crash, but that doesn't bother me so much—I'd notice that. But it might also silently produce the wrong result. I try not to be a scaredy squirrel about these things, but I must say that “rarely happening” bugs in a widely used platform bother me. When Toyota cars had random brake problems, the NHSTA ultimately concluded that floor mats, sticky pedals, and “pedal misapplication” were the culprits. But what if the electronics had a bug that only happens in a confluence of rare circumstances? They said no, but how can they really know?
It all reminds me of the Pentium bug from 1994. Intel had just released the first Pentium chip, and I immediately went and bought one at considerable expense to the management. Later I learned that a mathematics professor, Dr. Thomas Nicely of Lynchburg College, had run into a curious issue. On a small set of inputs, the multiplication was buggy. For example, 4195835- 4195835 / 3145727 × 3145727 yielded 256 instead of the expected 0. I tried it out on my new computer. Sure enough, I got 256. I tried it out on an older 486. I got 0.
It turned out that Intel had known about the bug but decided to ship the processor anyway. Intel claimed that under normal use, a typical consumer would only notice the problem once every 27,000 years. Unfortunately for Intel, Dr. Nicely had not been a normal user. Intel stonewalled for a while, but eventually they sent out replacement chips for everyone.
Was I a normal user? In the several months that I ran the defective chip, I noticed no problems. I even computed my tax return on it. Fortunately, I did not make $4195835 that year. But I applied for a replacement—I remember that I had to sign a form claiming to make mathematical computations. (They later gave the replacement to everyone.)
Uwe states that the Hotspot bugs in question are here,
here,
and here.
The first one is easy to check. I checked it and couldn't reproduce it. The
second bug requires a file microbenchmarks.jar. I don't know where
to get that. The third one is in the “Application client”. The Java EE application
client? If so, that's not something you'd want to misbehave in a shiny new
release, right? Only the second bug was reported to give incorrect results; the
others cause a crash. That bug was reported on July 23, 2011 and is classified
as “medium”.
That seems problematic to me. A rare crash is manageable, but silently getting the wrong result is not. I would have expected this to be a high priority bug. Don't they have criteria for this that say “Hotspot produces wrong result ⇒ take it seriously”? As it is, it just looks bad. Oracle had promised to ship JDK 7 by the end of July. Was that considered more important than to fix a showstopper bug? If so, that would seem a rather poor decision. Don't they realize that this leads to blog posts with headlines “Don’t Use Java 7, For Anything” or ”Java 7 Unsafe at Any Speed?”
In my introductory textbooks, I include a short article about the Pentium bug. Many times, colleagues who reviewed the book questioned whether this is a good use of space. Isn't that story outdated? And anyway, what does it have to do with computer science? I keep it in there. I imagine that maybe, one day, one of the students will become a manager, needs to make a decision about a bug that silently computes the wrong result, and remembers the story.
