StackOverflowError on boot from QueueItemAuthenticatorConfiguration

Issue

Upon starting up Jenkins, large StackOverflowErrors occur. The system loads, but is not fully functional due to a failure.

You may encounter errors such as:

java.lang.IllegalStateException:
The class jenkins.security.QueueItemAuthenticatorConfiguration was not found, potentially not yet loaded
java.lang.IllegalStateException: The class jenkins.security.QueueItemAuthenticatorConfiguration was not found, potentially not yet loaded
    at hudson.ExtensionList.getInstance(ExtensionList.java:166)
    at jenkins.security.QueueItemAuthenticatorConfiguration.get(QueueItemAuthenticatorConfiguration.java:61)
    at jenkins.security.QueueItemAuthenticatorConfiguration$ProviderImpl.getAuthenticators(QueueItemAuthenticatorConfiguration.java:70)
    at jenkins.security.QueueItemAuthenticatorProvider$IteratorImpl.hasNext(QueueItemAuthenticatorProvider.java:44)
    at hudson.model.Queue$Item.authenticate(Queue.java:2332)▼

The resulting stacktrace will look like this:

020-10-12 18:23:46.262+0000 [id=56] WARNING hudson.model.Descriptor#load: Failed to load /var/lib/jenkins/jenkins.security.QueueItemAuthenticatorConfiguration.xml
java.lang.StackOverflowError
    at com.thoughtworks.xstream.io.xml.XmlFriendlyNameCoder.decodeName(XmlFriendlyNameCoder.java:218)
    at com.thoughtworks.xstream.io.xml.XmlFriendlyNameCoder.decodeAttribute(XmlFriendlyNameCoder.java:144)
    at com.thoughtworks.xstream.io.AbstractReader.decodeAttribute(AbstractReader.java:75)
    at com.thoughtworks.xstream.io.xml.XppReader.getAttributeName(XppReader.java:151)
    at com.thoughtworks.xstream.io.AttributeNameIterator.next(AttributeNameIterator.java:37)
    at hudson.util.RobustReflectionConverter.doUnmarshal(RobustReflectionConverter.java:282)
    at hudson.util.RobustReflectionConverter.unmarshal(RobustReflectionConverter.java:269)▼

Environment

Workaround

While there is no fix for this currently, this workaround does serve to get the instance fully functional again:

Locate the jenkins.security.QueueItemAuthenticatorConfiguration.xml file in the $JENKINS_HOME directory.
Back this up to a safe location.
Remove the jenkins.security.QueueItemAuthenticatorConfiguration.xml file.
Restart Jenkins.

Tested product/plugin versions

CloudBees CI on modern cloud platforms - Managed controller 2.249.1.2

References

Reported Issue: JENKINS-61990

This article is part of our Knowledge Base and is provided for guidance-based purposes only. The solutions or workarounds described here are not officially supported by CloudBees and may not be applicable in all environments. Use at your own discretion, and test changes in a safe environment before applying them to production systems.