5.4. Known Issues for HBase

HBASE-10304 Running an hbase job jar: IllegalAccessError: class com.google.protobuf.ZeroCopyLiteralByteString cannot access its superclass com.google.protobuf.LiteralByteString

Problem: Some MapReduce jobs fail to launch. An exception similar to the following displays:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.IllegalAccessError: class com.google.protobuf.ZeroCopyLiteralByteString cannot access its superclass com.google.protobuf.LiteralByteString
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:792)
	at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:142)
	at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(URLClassLoader.java:449)
	at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$100(URLClassLoader.java:71)
	at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:361)
	at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:355)
	at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
	at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:354)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:424)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:357)
	at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.protobuf.ProtobufUtil.toScan(ProtobufUtil.java:818)
	at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.mapreduce.TableMapReduceUtil.convertScanToString(TableMapReduceUtil.java:433)
	at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.mapreduce.TableMapReduceUtil.initTableMapperJob(TableMapReduceUtil.java:186)
	at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.mapreduce.TableMapReduceUtil.initTableMapperJob(TableMapReduceUtil.java:147)
	at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.mapreduce.TableMapReduceUtil.initTableMapperJob(TableMapReduceUtil.java:270)
	at org.apache.hadoop.hbase.mapreduce.TableMapReduceUtil.initTableMapperJob(TableMapReduceUtil.java:100)
...
                       

This isssue occurs because of an optimization introduced in HBASE-9867 that inadvertently introduced a classloader dependency. This affects both jobs using the -libjars option and "fat jar," jobs which package their runtime dependencies in a nested lib folder.

Workaround: To satisfy the new classloader requirements, include hbase-protocol.jar in Hadoop's classpath. For a system-wide resolution, include a reference to the hbase-protocol.jar in hadoop's lib directory, using a symlink or by copying the jar into the new location.

To resolve on a per-job launch basis, specify a value for HADOOP_CLASSPATH at job submission time. If you are launching jobs that package their dependencies, all three of the following job launching commands satisfy this requirement:

$ HADOOP_CLASSPATH=/path/to/hbase-protocol.jar:/path/to/hbase/conf hadoop jar MyJob.jar MyJobMainClass
$ HADOOP_CLASSPATH=$(hbase mapredcp):/path/to/hbase/conf hadoop jar MyJob.jar MyJobMainClass
$ HADOOP_CLASSPATH=$(hbase classpath) hadoop jar MyJob.jar MyJobMainClass

If you are using jars that do not package their dependencies, use the following command structure:

$ HADOOP_CLASSPATH=$(hbase mapredcp):/etc/hbase/conf hadoop jar MyApp.jar MyJobMainClass -libjars $(hbase mapredcp | tr ':' ',') ...