There’s four permutations of the two relevant settings here. I only directly addressed the two permutations that were covered in the original post which was whether the daemon options were behaving correctly when there are JVM arguments. You’re not seeing anything different with the added examples, but just now including additional permutations for without JVM arguments. So for completeness, we can look at all of them.
The below table indicates a true/false value for the two relevant variables (jvmargs and daemon). It doesn’t matter how you have arrived at these values, either through defaults or explicitly setting/overriding the values. The next few values indicate whether a process with the java class name GradleMain or GradleDaemon will start when you start your build and die when your build completes. In these permutations, I’m ignoring the fact that a compatible daemon could already be running for simplicity (and because you said that there isn’t one in your case).
| jvmargs | daemon | GradleMain starts | GradleDaemon starts | GradleMain dies | GradleDaemon dies |
| true | true | yes | yes | yes | no |
** | true | false | yes | yes | yes | yes | **
| false | true | yes | yes | yes | no |
* | false | false | yes | no | yes | n/a | *
In both of your latest examples, you are specifying --no-daemon, so that’s the second and fourth row of the table. In your first example without JVM options (*), GradleMain will start, but GradleDaemon will not because there’s no need for it. In your second example with JVM options (**), GradleMain will start and GradleDaemon will start with the specified JVM options. This matches what you are showing in your running processes.
1638392314 36827 14375 0 3:38PM ttys001 0:01.23 java -Xdock:name=Gradle -Xdock:icon=/usr/local/Cellar/gradle/2.12/libexec/media/gradle.icns -Dorg.gradle.appname=gradle -classpath /usr/local/Cellar/gradle/2.12/libexec/lib/gradle-launcher-2.12.jar org.gradle.launcher.GradleMain build --no-daemon
1638392314 36876 36827 0 3:38PM ttys001 0:00.95 /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_72.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/java -client -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -Duser.country=US -Duser.language=en -Duser.variant -cp /usr/local/Cellar/gradle/2.12/libexec/lib/gradle-launcher-2.12.jar org.gradle.launcher.daemon.bootstrap.GradleDaemon 2.12
Your second line is the forked JVM with your specified JVM options. It is running GradleDaemon (the class), but it is not a daemon process. Once your build completes, both it and GradleMain will die. If you instead specified that you wanted the daemon (first row of the table), the GradleDaemon that you see would continue running as a daemon background after your build completed, and GradleMain died, waiting for the next GradleMain with compatible options to provide some work.