Project proposal: Shenandoah

[Jon Masamitsu]

Roman,

Thank you for the further information.   This large a contribution
is new territory for us so we'll be taking a bit of time to mull it
over.

Jon

On 2/28/2015 5:01 AM, Roman Kennke wrote:
> Hi Jon,
>
>>> Shenandoah is developed and maintained by Red Hat, yes, but the
>>> intention is, and has always been, to integrate it into upstream
>>> Hotspot, if OpenJDK people think it's feasible. The first step in this
>>> direction is the creation of a Shenandoah project (this proposal) and we
>>> also want to move forward with the Shenandoah JEP 189.
>> I would also like to understand how an integration of Shenandoah into
>> Hotspot would affect my day-to-day work.   For example if I build Hotspot
>> will I skip the build of Shenandoah sources by default?
> Build-wise Shenandoah is a GC like all other GCs. When you build
> Hotspot, you build Shenandoah. It will be excluded by setting
> INCLUDE_ALL_GCS to false, iirc. We could add a build flag to exclude
> Shenandoah, but I don't really see the point of it.
>
> Shenandoah is a bit special because it requires read and write barriers
> in the interpreter, C1, C2 and the runtime. We tried as much as possible
> to make this a clean interface, such to avoid scattering Shenandoah code
> all over the place. One of our goals is to not impact performance or
> behaviour with any other GC. If any other GC in the future requires
> similar barriers, it could just implement those interfaces. It is not
> perfect yet and needs some cleanup.
>
> All that being said, the intention of this project proposal is not
> directly to integrate Shenandoah into upstream Hotspot yet (that's the
> purpose of the JEP, ultimately), but to provide a development space for
> Shenandoah under the OpenJDK umbrella, where it belongs, where OpenJDK
> people can easily try it out, etc.
>
> BTW, according to http://openjdk.java.net/projects/#new-project we need
> a Hotspot group lead to declare to sponsor the project:
>
> "At least one Group Lead must declare that their Group is a sponsor of
> the proposed Project."
>
> Best regards,
> Roman
>
>
>> Jon
>>
>>> Best regards,
>>> Roman
>>>
>>>> My impression of Shenandoah was that it would be a project
>>>> developed and maintained by Redhat and (I don't recall where
>>>> this last part of my recollection comes from) that it would be kept
>>>> separate from the OpenJDK hotspot sources.    Is that all
>>>> correct?
>>>>
>>>> Jon
>>>>
>>>> On 2/19/2015 10:42 AM, Roman Kennke wrote:
>>>>> I'd like to discuss the creation of the project Shenandoah with myself
>>>>> *and/or* Christine Flood as initial lead and the Hotspot group as
>>>>> sponsoring group.
>>>>>
>>>>> It's aim is to implement a new garbage collector that reduces GC pause
>>>>> times for applications that require really large heaps. Existing GCs
>>>>> show pause times of several 100ms up to several seconds on heaps >
>>>>> 100GB. That is because they need to stop all Java threads for compacting
>>>>> the heap. Shenandoah implements a new algorithm that allows to compact
>>>>> heap while only stopping the Java threads briefly for root scanning, and
>>>>> then evacuates the heap concurrently. This makes pause times unrelated
>>>>> to the heap size and only proportional to the root set size.
>>>>>
>>>>> Shenandoah has so far been developed as part of the IcedTea project:
>>>>>
>>>>> http://icedtea.classpath.org/wiki/Shenandoah
>>>>>
>>>>> It has usable implementations for OpenJDK9 and OpenJDK8.
>>>>>
>>>>> Roman Kennke (me) is Principle Software Engineer at Red Hat, working on
>>>>> Shenandoah since two years now. Before this, he worked on Thermostat,
>>>>> and contributed to OpenJDK in several areas, most importantly the Zero
>>>>> and Shark ports, graphics, and ports to embedded platforms.
>>>>>
>>>>> Christine H. Flood is a prinicpal software engineer at Red Hat.  Most
>>>>> recently she's been working on Shenandoah, before that she worked at
>>>>> Oracle/Sun labs on the  Fortress programming language,  and on JVM
>>>>> Scalability. She's one of the inventors of both the parallel GC
>>>>> algorithm and G1.
>>>>>
>>>>> Initial committers and reviewers would be me and Christine.
>>>>>
>>>>> Could we both be project leads? Christine doesn't have an OpenJDK
>>>>> idendity yet...
>>>>>
>>>>> Best regards,
>>>>> Roman
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>
>