Preventing Class Definitions from Compacting At GC Cycle

[Mikael Gerdin]

On Monday 04 November 2013 11.33.40 David Holmes wrote:
> Adding hotspot-gc and (hopefully) bcc'ing the discuss list.
> 
> David
> 
> On 3/11/2013 5:18 AM, serkan özal wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > I am not sure that target of mail is this group or not but I don't know
> > better one for asking :) I am currently working on an OffHeap solution
> > and I have a problem with "Compact" phase of GC.As I see at "Compact"
> > phase, location of classes these not loaded by bootloader may be changed.
> > However, location of classes these loaded by bootloader (classloaders are
> > null) are not changed.Changing memory location of class definition fails
> > my OffHeap solution. Compacting can be disabled by VM arguments but I
> > don't want to use these arguments. Because disabling compaction for all
> > objects causes increasing of fragmentation. In addition, I tried class
> > pinning with JNI by "NewGlobalRef" method but it doesn't prevent
> > compacting. As I understood, it only hides object from garbage collected.
> > In brief, is there any way to prevent compacting of any specific class
> > defition (or object) at GC cycle?Is there any bit, offset or field (such
> > as mark_oop) in object header to prevent compacting of fully from GC for
> > any specific object or class? Thanks in advance.

There is no way to prevent the objects from moving.

You need to either:
* keep JNI Handles (jobject) to the objects instead of the "oop" object 
pointers.
* add hooks to the garbage collectors through a "oops_do"-style callback 
interface. Look at other implementors of oops_do to see how to do it.


Also, your observation about classes loaded in by the null classloader not 
moving is not technically correct. They can move as well, but since a lot of 
them are loaded early they may not need to move.

All of this has changed as of JDK 8, when we removed the perm gen and the 
whole concept of moving classes.

/Mikael


> > --
> > Serkan ÖZAL