RFR(S): 7041440: G1: assert(obj->is_oop_or_null(true )) failed: Error #

[John Cuthbertson]

Hi Everyone,

Can I have a couple of volunteers to review the fix for this CR - the 
webrev can be found at: http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~johnc/7041440/webrev.0

The issue here was that, during a marking cycle, we had a heap region 
(R) that was allocated as a young GC alloc region during an evacuation 
pause (pause A). In the same pause it was retired and its NTAMS value 
was set to top(). It was also added to the collection set for the next 
evacuation pause (pause B).

After pause A, a concurrent marking task claimed region R and started to 
scan it. Because of the test configuration the concurrent marking did 
not run for very long before pause B.

During pause B, region R was evacuated and added to the free list. The 
concurrent mark task which had earlier claimed R for scanning was still 
holding on to it.

During a subsequent evacuation pause region R was allocated as an old GC 
alloc region. When R was retired its NTAMS was set to top().

During the subsequent concurrent marking, the region fields in the 
concurrent marking task were updated resulting in the value of the task 
local finger being set to R's NTAMS value - effectively skipping 
scanning the objects copied into R when it was  an old GC alloc region.

The solution is, during an evacuation pause, to scan the local fingers 
of the concurrent marking tasks. If we find local finger that points 
into the collection set then we need to have the concurrent mark task 
give up that claimed region as the values in the region fields will 
become stale. This will cause the concurrent mark task to claim a new 
region when marking restarts after the pause.

Testing: the original failing test case; gc test suite with a low 
marking threshold. A jprt test job is in the queue.

Thanks,

JohnC