RFR: 8269897: Shenandoah: Resolve UNKNOWN access strength, where possible [v2]

[Aleksey Shipilev]

On Thu, 8 Jul 2021 18:40:33 GMT, Roman Kennke <rkennke at openjdk.org> wrote:

>> We've observed test failures in jcstress, see:
>> https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8269897
>> 
>> We used to treat UNKNOWN reference accesses like weak accesses. UNKNOWN is used for Unsafe, reflection and JNI accesses, where it cannot be determined at compilation-time if we are accessing a regular field or a Reflection.referent field. The rationale for treating UNKNOWN as weak was that if the reference is a regular reference, then the value would be strongly reachable anyway, and only if it is a referent field would reachability matter. However, it turns out that this assumption is wrong: the test shows that a reference that is only weakly reachable can be legitimately written into a field, thus resurrecting the reference, and when that weakly reachable reference is loaded, it would be (wrongly) filtered as NULL.
>> 
>> A fix is to treat UNKNOWN accesses as strong. Accessing Reference.referent via reflection, JNI or Unsafe is Bad Idea anyway.
>> This test shows the problem with CAS, but I believe it affects all accesses via reflection, JNI, etc.
>> 
>> Testing:
>>  - [x] the provided jcstress test
>>  - [x] hotspot_gc_shenandoah
>>  - [x] tier1
>
> Roman Kennke has updated the pull request incrementally with one additional commit since the last revision:
> 
>   Revert C2 changes

Current patch passes my testing, thanks. Still think we need to do asserts for extra safety.

-------------

PR: https://git.openjdk.java.net/jdk/pull/4697