RFR: 8307378: Allow collectors to provide specific values for GC notifications' actions

[Stefan Karlsson]

On Wed, 3 May 2023 18:17:20 GMT, William Kemper <wkemper at openjdk.org> wrote:

> At the end of a GC pause, a `GarbageCollectionNotificationInfo` may be emitted. The notification has a `gcAction` field which presently originates from the field `_gc_end_message` in `GCMemoryManager`. Concurrent collectors such as Shenandoah, ZGC and G1 may have more (brief) pauses in their cycle than they have memory managers. This makes it difficult for gc notification listeners to determine the phase of the cycle that emitted the notification. We are proposing a change to allow collectors to define specific values for the `gcAction` to make it easier for notification listeners to classify the gc phase responsible for the notification.

The proposed patch introduces two ways to inject these messages, which makes the code slightly harder to follow. I wonder if it wouldn't be easier if we just had one, a bit more flexible, way to provide the message. What do you think about something like this:
https://github.com/stefank/jdk/commit/52e9fe84c2bc14b21824068d71419d0e1f0796c1

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PR Comment: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/13785#issuecomment-1534816352