Until now, the bootimage build hasn't supported using the Java
invocation API to create a VM, destroy it, and create another in the
same process. Ideally, we would be able to create multiple VMs
simultaneously without any interference between them. In fact, Avian
is designed to support this for the most part, but there are a few
places we use global, mutable state which prevent this from working.
Most notably, the bootimage is modified in-place at runtime, so the
best we can do without extensive changes is to clean up the bootimage
when the VM is destroyed so it's ready for later instances. Hence
this commit.
Ultimately, we can move towards a fully reentrant VM by making the
bootimage immutable, but this will require some care to avoid
performance regressions. Another challenge is our Posix signal
handlers, which currently rely on a global handle to the VM, since you
can't, to my knowledge, pass a context pointer when registering a
signal handler. Thread local variables won't necessarily help, since
a thread might attatch to more than one VM at a time.
This monster commit is the first step towards supporting
cross-architecture bootimage builds. The challenge is to build a heap
and code image for the target platform where the word size and
endianess may differ from those of the build architecture. That means
the memory layout of objects may differ due to alignment and size
differences, so we can't just copy objects into the heap image
unchanged; we must copy field by field, resizing values, reversing
endianess and shifting offsets as necessary.
This commit also removes POD (plain old data) type support from the
type generator because it added a lot of complication and little
value.
This rather large commit modifies the VM to use non-local returns to
throw exceptions instead of simply setting Thread::exception and
returning frame-by-frame as it used to. This has several benefits:
* Functions no longer need to check Thread::exception after each call
which might throw an exception (which would be especially tedious
and error-prone now that any function which allocates objects
directly or indirectly might throw an OutOfMemoryError)
* There's no need to audit the code for calls to functions which
previously did not throw exceptions but later do
* Performance should be improved slightly due to both the reduced
need for conditionals and because undwinding now occurs in a single
jump instead of a series of returns
The main disadvantages are:
* Slightly higher overhead for entering and leaving the VM via the
JNI and JDK methods
* Non-local returns can make the code harder to read
* We must be careful to register destructors for stack-allocated
resources with the Thread so they can be called prior to a
non-local return
The non-local return implementation is similar to setjmp/longjmp,
except it uses continuation-passing style to avoid the need for
cooperation from the C/C++ compiler. Native C++ exceptions would have
also been an option, but that would introduce a dependence on
libstdc++, which we're trying to avoid for portability reasons.
Finally, this commit ensures that the VM throws an OutOfMemoryError
instead of aborting when it reaches its memory ceiling. Currently, we
treat the ceiling as a soft limit and temporarily exceed it as
necessary to allow garbage collection and certain internal allocations
to succeed, but refuse to allocate any Java objects until the heap
size drops back below the ceiling.
If the VM runs out of heap space and the "avian.heap.dump" system
property was specified at startup, the VM will write a heap dump to
the filename indicated by that property. This dump may be analyzed
using e.g. DumpStats.java.
We now support immortal objects, which the GC will scan for references
but not consider for collection. On x86_64, we allocate JIT code memory
via mmap, which lets us map memory into the bottom 2GB of the address
space, ensuring that 32-bit relative jumps and calls work.
