RFR: 8305895: Implement JEP 450: Compact Object Headers (Experimental) [v15]

[Roberto Castañeda Lozano]

On Fri, 13 Sep 2024 13:11:45 GMT, Roman Kennke <rkennke at openjdk.org> wrote:

>> This is the main body of the JEP 450: Compact Object Headers (Experimental).
>> 
>> It is also a follow-up to #20640, which now also includes (and supersedes) #20603 and #20605, plus the Tiny Class-Pointers parts that have been previously missing.
>> 
>> Main changes:
>>  - Introduction of the (experimental) flag UseCompactObjectHeaders. All changes in this PR are protected by this flag. The purpose of the flag is to provide a fallback, in case that users unexpectedly observe problems with the new implementation. The intention is that this flag will remain experimental and opt-in for at least one release, then make it on-by-default and diagnostic (?), and eventually deprecate and obsolete it. However, there are a few unknowns in that plan, specifically, we may want to further improve compact headers to 4 bytes, we are planning to enhance the Klass* encoding to support virtually unlimited number of Klasses, at which point we could also obsolete UseCompressedClassPointers.
>>  - The compressed Klass* can now be stored in the mark-word of objects. In order to be able to do this, we are add some changes to GC forwarding (see below) to protect the relevant (upper 22) bits of the mark-word. Significant parts of this PR deal with loading the compressed Klass* from the mark-word. This PR also changes some code paths (mostly in GCs) to be more careful when accessing Klass* (or mark-word or size) to be able to fetch it from the forwardee in case the object is forwarded.
>>  - Self-forwarding in GCs (which is used to deal with promotion failure) now uses a bit to indicate 'self-forwarding'. This is needed to preserve the crucial Klass* bits in the header. This also allows to get rid of preserved-header machinery in SerialGC and G1 (Parallel GC abuses preserved-marks to also find all other relevant oops).
>>  - Full GC forwarding now uses an encoding similar to compressed-oops. We have 40 bits for that, and can encode up to 8TB of heap. When exceeding 8TB, we turn off UseCompressedClassPointers (except in ZGC, which doesn't use the GC forwarding at all).
>>  - Instances can now have their base-offset (the offset where the field layouter starts to place fields) at offset 8 (instead of 12 or 16).
>>  - Arrays will now store their length at offset 8.
>>  - CDS can now write and read archives with the compressed header. However, it is not possible to read an archive that has been written with an opposite setting of UseCompactObjectHeaders. Some build machinery is added so that _co...
>
> Roman Kennke has updated the pull request incrementally with one additional commit since the last revision:
> 
>   Various touch-ups

> * Note that oopDesc::klass_offset_in_bytes() is not used by +UCOH paths anymore. The only exception is C2, which uses it as a placeholder/identifier of the special memory slice that only LoadNKlass uses. The backend then extracts the original oop and loads its mark-word and extracts the narrow-Klass* from that.

I agree that this is the simplest and least intrusive way of getting klass loading working in C2 for this experimental version of the feature. However, the approach seems brittle and error-prone, and it may be hard to maintain in the long run. Therefore, I think that a more principled and robust modeling will be needed, after this PR is integrated, in preparation for the non-experimental version.

An alternative that seems promising is to hide the object header klass pointer extraction and make it part of the `LoadNKlass` node semantics, as illustrated in this example:

![alternative-modeling](https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/06243966-3065-4969-a2dd-d05133b36366)

`LoadNKlass` nodes can then be expanded into more primitive operations (load and shift for compact headers, load with `klass_offset_in_bytes()` for original headers) within C2's back-end or even during code emission as sketched [here](https://github.com/robcasloz/jdk/commit/6cb4219f101e3be982264071c2cb1d0af1c6d754). @rkennke is this similar to what you tried out ("Expanding it as a macro")?

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PR Comment: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/20677#issuecomment-2352253326