The EJB3 spec mandates that the params passed to beans during invocation on a remote interface of the bean, be treated with pass-by-value semantics. Currently we do allow individual applications to override this semantic by setting a per application level configuration which then uses pass-by-reference semantics for in-VM calls on the remote interfaces of the bean. The current setting is allowed in a jboss-ejb-client.xml of the application as follows:

<jboss-ejb-client xmlns="urn:jboss:ejb-client:1.0">
    <client-context>
        <ejb-receivers local-receiver-pass-by-value="false"/>
    </client-context>
</jboss-ejb-client>

We should allow configuring this semantic at the EJB3 subsystem level so that it can be applicable to all EJB applications (unless overridden by the application) deployed on the server.