Possible NPE on controller service start ---------------------------------------- Key: WFCORE-1855 URL: https://issues.jboss.org/browse/WFCORE-1855 Project: WildFly Core Issue Type: Bug Reporter: David Lloyd Assignee: Brian Stansberry In {{org.jboss.as.controller.AbstractControllerService}}, the {{start}} method starts up a background thread which performs a certain amount of the boot process. Before this thread is started, a volatile field {{controller}} is initialized with the controller reported by the {{start()}} method. Inside this thread, some work is performed, and at the end of a certain amount of work, the {{finishBoot()}} method is invoked. This method calls {{controller.finishBoot()}}, referencing the field that was set in the {{start()}} method. The problem arises when the service itself is stopped before the boot thread completes. This causes the {{controller}} field to be nulled out, resulting in an NPE. I think we need to look at: * Why are we using a background thread for this? * Why are we _not_ using the asynchronous startup feature? I think we must do one of these two things in order to make this code "safe".