In this thread it is not clear what people mean by passivation "not working". I don't think the spec mandates that beans "must be" passivated. If you look in different vendors documentation you will find a number of different approaches and some ways to control that behavior with various configurations.
GlassFish is no different. For more details on GlassFish SFSB including passivation see:
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/820-4336/beahx?a=view
Or Here as one example among many is what Oracle's OC4J server documentation says about SFSB passivation:
Passivation is enabled by default. For more information on enabling and disabling passivation, see "Configuring Passivation".
OC4J will passivate stateful session beans when any combination of the following criteria is met:
*
exceed idle timeout;
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exceed threshold for maximum number of instances or exceed absolute maximum number of instances;
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exceed threshold for maximum JVM memory consumption;
*
shutdown OC4J instance.
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