RFR: 8370041: GenShen: Filter young pointers from thread local SATB buffers when only marking old [v4]
Y. Srinivas Ramakrishna
ysr at openjdk.org
Thu Nov 6 18:57:04 UTC 2025
On Thu, 6 Nov 2025 18:36:48 GMT, William Kemper <wkemper at openjdk.org> wrote:
>> When GenShen is only marking the old generation, we do not need the SATB mechanism to preserve young pointers. We currently filter these out of the SATB buffers during the final-update-refs and init-mark safepoints. This increases latency and introduces no small amount of complexity. It should be possible to instead filter out these pointers when the SATB buffers are 'compacted' before being 'completed'.
>>
>> # Background
>> When GenShen is marking the old generation it leaves the SATB barrier enabled. When a young collection interrupts old marking, it creates a situation where a mutator thread could overwrite a field holding a pointer into a collection set region. The SATB barrier will dutifully place this object in the SATB queue. If this pointer makes it into a mark queue, the marking thread will crash. Prior to this change, GenShen filtered out such pointers _after_ the thread local SATB buffers were completed. After this change, such pointers are filtered out _before_ the buffers are completed. This is more inline with the natural way of things.
>
> William Kemper has updated the pull request incrementally with one additional commit since the last revision:
>
> Improve comment describing the need for a method to filter SATB buffers for degenerated cycles
I approved this, but will follow up with you offline to more properly understand this.
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Marked as reviewed by ysr (Reviewer).
PR Review: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/27983#pullrequestreview-3430002460
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