RFR: 8170307: Stack size option -Xss is ignored

Thomas Stüfe thomas.stuefe at gmail.com
Tue Nov 29 10:39:51 UTC 2016


Hi David,

thanks for the good explanation. Change looks good, I really like the
comment in capture_initial_stack().

Question, with -Xss given and being smaller than current thread stack size,
guard pages may appear in the middle of the invoking thread stack? I always
thought this is a bit dangerous. If your model is to have the VM created
from the main thread, which then goes off to do different things, and have
other threads then attach and run java code, main thread later may crash in
unrelated native code just because it reached the stack depth of the hava
threads? Or am I misunderstanding something?

Thanks, Thomas


On Fri, Nov 25, 2016 at 11:38 AM, David Holmes <david.holmes at oracle.com>
wrote:

> Bug: https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8170307
>
> The bug is not public unfortunately for non-technical reasons - but see my
> eval below.
>
> Background: if you load the JVM from the primordial thread of a process
> (not done by the java launcher since JDK 6), there is an artificial stack
> limit imposed on the initial thread (by sticking the guard page at the
> limit position of the actual stack) of the minimum of the -Xss setting and
> 2M. So if you set -Xss to > 2M it is ignored for the main thread even if
> the true stack is, say, 8M. This limitation dates back 10-15 years and is
> no longer relevant today and should be removed (see below). I've also added
> additional explanatory notes.
>
> webrev: http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~dholmes/8170307/webrev/
>
> Testing was manually done by modifying the launcher to not run the VM in a
> new thread, and checking the resulting stack size used.
>
> This change will only affect hosted JVMs launched with a -Xss value > 2M.
>
> Thanks,
> David
> -----
>
> Bug eval:
>
> JDK-4441425 limits the stack to 8M as a safeguard against an unlimited
> value from getrlimit in 1.3.1, but further constrained that to 2M in 1.4.0
> due to JDK-4466587.
>
> By 1.4.2 we have the basic form of the current problematic code:
>
> #ifndef IA64
>   if (rlim.rlim_cur > 2 * K * K) rlim.rlim_cur = 2 * K * K;
> #else
>   // Problem still exists RH7.2 (IA64 anyway) but 2MB is a little small
>   if (rlim.rlim_cur > 4 * K * K) rlim.rlim_cur = 4 * K * K;
> #endif
>
>   _initial_thread_stack_size = rlim.rlim_cur & ~(page_size() - 1);
>
>   if (max_size && _initial_thread_stack_size > max_size) {
>      _initial_thread_stack_size = max_size;
>   }
>
> This was added by JDK-4678676 to allow the stack of the main thread to be
> _reduced_ below the default 2M/4M if the -Xss value was smaller than
> that.** There was no intent to allow the stack size to follow -Xss
> arbitrarily due to the operational constraints imposed by the OS/glibc at
> the time when dealing with the primordial process thread.
>
> ** It could not actually change the actual stack size of course, but set
> the guard pages to limit use to the expected stack size.
>
> In JDK 6, under JDK-6316197, the launcher was changed to create the JVM in
> a new thread, so that it was not limited by the idiosyncracies of the OS or
> thread library primordial thread handling. However, the stack size
> limitations remained in place in case the VM was launched from the
> primordial thread of a user application via the JNI invocation API.
>
> I believe it should be safe to remove the 2M limitation now.
>


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