Testng, Emma, Cobertura, coverage and JDK 7 result in ClassFormatError and VerifyError

code-coverage java-7 cobertura emma jacoco
Jagger picture Jagger · Aug 10, 2011 · Viewed 37.9k times · Source

I have switched to the newest JDK 7 and I am having problems with running testng unit test on byte code that is fiddled by emma coverage tool. None of my test cases are run correctly and for most of them I am receiving such errors.

 java.lang.ClassFormatError: Illegal local variable table length 10 in method measurement.meter.AbstractSerialPortMeter.<init>(Lmeasurement/meter/SerialPort;)V at measurement.meter.Elc3133aTest.setUp(Elc3133aTest.java:42)

I have found an article here JSR 292 Goodness Fast Code Coverage Tool Less 10k, which is saying that "JSR 292 introduces a new bytecode instruction invokedynamic but also several new kind of constant pool constants. Which means that most of the tools that parse bytecodes like ASM, BCEL, findbugs or EMMA will need to be updated to be java 7 compatible."

Checked Emma homepage, but it looks like it has not been updated for a long long time.

Has anybody solved a similar problem?

I have also tried with Cobertura. It looks to work a bit better but I am getting a lot of exceptions of type VerifyError.

java.lang.VerifyError: Expecting a stackmap frame at branch target 85 in method measurement.meter.AbstractSerialPortMeter.close()V at offset 26
at measurement.meter.AbstractSerialPortMeterTest.setUp(AbstractSerialPortMeterTest.java:27)

Answer

Pedro Ballesteros picture Pedro Ballesteros · Mar 6, 2012

I had same problem using maven cobertura plugin. All tests failed when run from cobertura:report. But all tests succeeded when run directly from surefire plugin. As some of you already said the problem is that coberture byte code instrumentation of is not compatible with JDK7.

You can see here http://vikashazrati.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/quicktip-verifyerror-with-jdk-7/ that the exception is related to the "new type checker with StackMapTable attributes" (see: -X:+UseSplitVerifier JVM option in http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/tech/vmoptions-jsp-140102.html).

So my solution is to configure surefire-plugin to always execute the tests with JVM arg "-XX:-UseSplitVerifier. It works well with and without cobertura instrumentation.

My surefire configuration in maven:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.12</version>
    <configuration>
        <argLine>-XX:-UseSplitVerifier</argLine>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

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