eclipse dies when starting up

[Tristan Wibberley]

This is on up-to-date dapper (amd64).

I had eclipse working, but reinstalled and now it has stopped. When attempting to start eclipse, it shows a dialogue with the following message just after the progress bar closes (leaving the splash screen behind when pressing close):

JVM terminated. Exit code=1
/usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj/bin/java
-Djava.library.path=/usr/lib/jni
-Dgnu.gcj.precompiled.db.path=/var/lib/gcj-4.1/classmap.db
-Dgnu.gcj.runtime.VMClassLoader.library_control=never
-Dosgi.locking=none
-jar /usr/share/eclipse/startup.jar
-os linux
-ws gtk
-arch x86_64
-launcher /usr/lib/eclipse/eclipse
-name Eclipse
-showsplash 600
-exitdata 260013
-install /usr/share/eclipse
-vm /usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj/bin/java
-vmargs
-Djava.library.path=/usr/lib/jni
-Dgnu.gcj.precompiled.db.path=/var/lib/gcj-4.1/classmap.db
-Dgnu.gcj.runtime.VMClassLoader.library_control=never
-Dosgi.locking=none
-jar /usr/share/eclipse/startup.jar

When issuing this command under gdb I get:

$ gdb /usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj/bin/java
GNU gdb 6.4-debian
Copyright 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
GDB is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License, and you are
welcome to change it and/or distribute copies of it under certain conditions.
Type "show copying" to see the conditions.
There is absolutely no warranty for GDB. Type "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "x86_64-linux-gnu"...(no debugging symbols found)
Using host libthread_db library "/lib/libthread_db.so.1".

(gdb) set args -Djava.library.path=/usr/lib/jni \
-Dgnu.gcj.precompiled.db.path=/var/lib/gcj-4.1/classmap.db \
-Dgnu.gcj.runtime.VMClassLoader.library_control=never \
-Dosgi.locking=none \
-jar /usr/share/eclipse/startup.jar \
-os linux \
-ws gtk \
-arch x86_64 \
-launcher /usr/lib/eclipse/eclipse \
-name Eclipse \
-showsplash 600 \
-exitdata 260013 \
-install /usr/share/eclipse \
-vm /usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj/bin/java \
-vmargs \
-Djava.library.path=/usr/lib/jni \
-Dgnu.gcj.precompiled.db.path=/var/lib/gcj-4.1/classmap.db \
-Dgnu.gcj.runtime.VMClassLoader.library_control=never \
-Dosgi.locking=none \
-jar /usr/share/eclipse/startup.jar
(gdb) r
Starting program: /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.4.2-gcj-4.1-1.4.2.0/bin/java -Djava.library.path=/usr/lib/jni -Dgnu.gcj.precompiled.db.path=/var/lib/gcj-4.1/classmap.db -Dgnu.gcj.runtime.VMClassLoader.library_control=never -Dosgi.locking=none -jar /usr/share/eclipse/startup.jar -os linux -ws gtk -arch x86_64 -launcher /usr/lib/eclipse/eclipse -name Eclipse -showsplash 600 -exitdata 260013 -install /usr/share/eclipse -vm /usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj/bin/java -vmargs -Djava.library.path=/usr/lib/jni -Dgnu.gcj.precompiled.db.path=/var/lib/gcj-4.1/classmap.db -Dgnu.gcj.runtime.VMClassLoader.library_control=never -Dosgi.locking=none -jar /usr/share/eclipse/startup.jar
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)

Program received signal SIGPWR, Power fail/restart.
0x00002aaaaccb5a9a in ?? ()
(gdb) thread apply all bt
(gdb)

And the splash screen again remains.

When issuing it directly from bash, I get a segfault.

[Tristan Wibberley (tristan-wibberley)]

Attaching an strace (bzip2ed) to help track it down. Looks like some data gets munged as there is a huge mmap attempt.

[Erich Pawlik (erichpawlik)]

This most likely is not an Eclipse issue but a issue related to gcj. I had the same problem. It did go away after I switched to the sun java.

Regards

Erich

[Tristan Wibberley (tristan-wibberley)]

I've got it using the sun java by changing the launcher to run /bin/sh -c 'JAVA_HOME=... eclipse' so this is indeed probably a gcj bug.

[Nuño (niglesi)]

itś only a comment.
In my PC it seems that eclipse-platform-common is not instaled.
Then I install it.
In these case i've another problem.
I purged all the eclipse packages and make a clean install of eclipse-sdk. Now it starts OK.
We have a little problemwith eclipse packages ¿don't you think so?

[Danny Staple (danny-orionrobots)]

Bingo - GCJ sounds an extremel likely culprit, as I was having an issue with OpenOffice.org also when creating a database, which turned out to be down to GCJ as switching JVM made it work. This is Bug #60979.

Meanwhile, can we get eclipse to use the Sun JRE instead?

[John Wiedenhoeft (wiedenhoeft)]

I once had a working Eclipse. After some problems installing GEF I reinstalled it, and now I get exactly this error. I purged my installation as Nuño did, removed the .eclipse folder by hand and reinstalled, but with no effect. I'm not aware of any updates or config changes in the meantime.

[Danny Staple (danny-orionrobots)]

John, try running it with the SUN Java Runtime environment instead of GCJ as described above. I think GCJ is the root of this problem.

[Danny Staple (danny-orionrobots)]

Since the Java 1.5 license is OSS compatible (1.4.2 isnt), maybe that should become the default for both this and openoffice. Not only was it considerably faster, but a number of java related issues (read CRASHES) stop.

That is unless both the serious and repeatable issues, and speed problems with GCJ can actually be resolved.

[Thom Pischke (thom-pischke)]

Just tried running eclipse after installing edgy. First it complained about mozilla-browser not being installed, then it hung on the splash screen.

It was working fine in Dapper.

I'm using the Java 5 SDK update 8, installed from the repositories.

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

3.2.1 in edgy works fine for me

[Thom Pischke (thom-pischke)]

3.2.1? Is that even in the edgy repositories?

I do have eclipse 3.2 running fine on edgy, but I had to download and install it manually from the eclipse website.

I was more concerned that the bundled eclipse 3.1 in edgy doesn't seem to work after upgrading.

[Thom Pischke (thom-pischke)]

Reinstalled eclipse 3.1 from repository on a different computer and it worked fine, so the problem I reported is probably due to operator error, or some conflict with some other installed package.