After upgrading Jenkins to 2.277.3 the Gearman plugin management thread dies due to:
{{

A thread (Gearman worker contint2001.wikimedia.org_manager/561) died unexpectedly due to an uncaught exception, this may leave your Jenkins in a bad way and is usually indicative of a bug in the code.
java.lang.StackOverflowError
at org.acegisecurity.context.SecurityContext$1.getAuthentication(SecurityContext.java:46)
at org.acegisecurity.context.SecurityContext$2.getAuthentication(SecurityContext.java:60)
at org.acegisecurity.context.SecurityContext$1.getAuthentication(SecurityContext.java:46)
at org.acegisecurity.context.SecurityContext$2.getAuthentication(SecurityContext.java:60)
at org.acegisecurity.context.SecurityContext$1.getAuthentication(SecurityContext.java:46)
}}

Once the management work thread is dead, the stop and set_description functions can no more be run.

Most probably due to a race condition of some sort when doing:
{{
SecurityContext oldContext = ACL.impersonate(ACL.SYSTEM);
}}

And would thus be related to JEP-227

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T281737