NetBeans, VisualVM, etc. broken with latest security release for 12.04

[Neil C Smith]

The latest security update of OpenJDK 6 appears to have broken NetBeans and other NetBeans platform based applications such as VisualVM. It may break many other Swing applications - not tested. Manifests as UI issues, NPE's and lockups (eg. find usages dialog hangs NetBeans). One stack trace shows EventQueue.isDispatchThread() returning false from within the dispatch thread.

All is fine in current OpenJDK 7. Looking at NetBeans on OpenJDK 6 from VisualVM (running on 7!) shows multiple AWT event queues and sometimes deadlock between them. Same result is not seen when running NetBeans with OpenJDK 7.

Running on 12.04 with OpenJDK-6-JRE 6b27-1.12.6-1ubuntu0.12.04.2

[Rich Price (rich-gandalf)]

I had been having this problem with OpenJDK 6
[openjdk-6-jre 6b27-1.12.6-1ubuntu0.12.04.2]
and NetBeans 7.3.1. This problem first occurred
with the most recent upgrade of OpenJDK 6
in Ubuntu 12.04. The problem does not occur
after an upgrade to OpenJDK 7. See these bug
reports for more details on this problem:

https://netbeans.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=233338
https://netbeans.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=233381

I thought that I should apprise you of this
situation so that you can insure that the same
problem is not brought forward to OpenJDK 7.

[Alexei (alexei-kasatkin)]

Netbeans on Ubuntu 12.04 is almost unusable.

Now JVM starts creating EventQueue thread for each dialog! (like that was 10 years ago?)
It cause multiple access from non-event-dispatcher threads that cause random hanging and bugs.
We have such problems with OpenStreetMap editing application JOSM, here is the description:
http://josm.openstreetmap.de/ticket/8921#comment:22

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Alexei (alexei-kasatkin)]

Forgot to insert versions:
java version "1.6.0_27"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.12.6) (6b27-1.12.6-1ubuntu0.12.04.2)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 20.0-b12, mixed mode)

Also reported for JOSM on java version "1.6.0_27" Linux Debian GNU/Linux 7.1 (wheezy)

[Don-vip (vincent-privat)]

IcedTea bug report: http://icedtea.classpath.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1516