Whereas the GNU Classpath port used the strategy of patching Classpath
with core classes from Avian so as to minimize changes to the VM, this
port uses the opposite strategy: abstract and isolate
classpath-specific features in the VM similar to how we abstract away
platform-specific features in system.h. This allows us to use an
unmodified copy of OpenJDK's class library, including its core classes
and augmented by a few VM-specific classes in the "avian" package.
In order to facilitate making the VM compatible with multiple class
libraries, it's useful to separate the VM-specific representation of
these classes from the library implementations. This commit
introduces VMClass, VMField, and VMMethod for that purpose.
A long time ago, I refactored the class initialization code in the VM,
but did not notice until today that it had caused the
process=interpret build to break on certain recursive initializations.
In particular, we were not always detecting when a thread recursively
tried to initialize a class it was already in the process of
initializing, leading to the mistaken assumption that another thread
was initializing it and that we should wait until it was done, in
which case we would wait forever.
This commit ensures that we always detect recursive initialization and
short-circuit it.
It's not safe to use malloc from a signal handler, so we can't
allocate new memory when handling segfaults or Thread.getStackTrace
signals. Instead, we allocate a fixed-size backup heap for each
thread ahead of time and use it if there's no space left in the normal
heap pool. In the rare case that the backup heap isn't large enough,
we fall back to using a preallocated exception without a stack trace
as a last resort.
See commit 8120bee4dc for the original
problem description and solution. That commit and a couple of related
ones had to be reverted when we found they had introduced GC-safety
regressions leading to crashes.
This commit restores the reverted code and fixes the regressions.
We're seeing race conditions which occasionally lead to assertion
failures and thus crashes, so I'm reverting these changes for now:
29309fb414e92674cb738120bee4dc
Due to SWT's nasty habit of creating a new object monitor for every
task added to Display.asyncExec, we've found that, on Windows at
least, we tend to run out of OS handles due to the large number of
mutexes we create between garbage collections.
One way to address this might be to trigger a GC when either the
number of monitors created since the last GC exceeds a certain number
or when the total number of monitors in the VM reaches a certain
number. Both of these risk hurting performance, especially if they
force major collections which would otherwise be infrequent. Also,
it's hard to know what the values of such thresholds should be on a
given system.
Instead, we reimplement Java monitors using atomic compare-and-swap
(CAS) and thread-specific native locks for blocking in the case of
contention. This way, we can create an arbitrary number of monitors
without creating any new native locks. The total number of native
locks needed by the VM is bounded instead by the number of live
threads plus a small constant.
Note that if we ever add support for an architecture which does not
support CAS, we'll need to provide a fallback monitor implementation.
If another thread succeeds in entering the "exclusive" state while we
use the fast path to transition the current thread to "active", we
must switch back to "idle" temporarily to allow the exclusive thread a
chance to continue, and then retry the transition to "active" via the
slow path.
These paths reduce contention among threads by using atomic operations
and memory barriers instead of mutexes where possible. This is
especially important for JNI calls, since each such call involves two
state transitions: from "active" to "idle" and back.
This implementation does not conform to the Java standard in that
finalize methods are called from whichever thread happens to be garbage
collecting, and that thread may hold locks, whereas the standard
guarantees that finalize will be run from a thread which holds no locks.
Also, an object will never be finalized more than once, even if its
finalize method "rescues" (i.e. makes reachable) the object such that it
might become unreachable a second time and thus a candidate for
finalization once more. It's not clear to me from the standard if this
is OK or not.
Nonwithstanding the above, this implementation is useful for "normal"
finalize methods which simply release resources associated with an
object.
