question on TLABs

[Deneau, Tom]

A hotspot-related question about java heap buffers...

A few months ago we had experimented with allowing the hsail kernel to do java heap allocations.
At that time, we had one or more inactive "donor threads" which were normal Java threads
who didn't do any allocations but their TLABs were used by the hsail kernel.  (A single
TLAB can be shared among multiple workitems).

Since that time our hsail runtime routines have been more tightly integrated into the JVM
(as opposed to going thru JNI as they used to) so that gives us more flexibility in this area.

My question is, what is the preferred way to get some heap memory that the hsail kernel
can allocate into?  Do we need to have a do-nothing java thread backing up each tlab?
Can the GC be made aware of TLABs that are not associated with threads?

-- Tom