Restrictions for lock coarsening?

[Tom Rodriguez]

> This already came up once and I wanted to ask the following question
> back then (but forgot):
>
> Why is it an absolute time value and not some definite point in the VM
> startup sequence?

The delay in enabling biased locking is basically just a workaround  
for startup issues that were encountered with enabling biased locking  
by default.  4 seconds was an empirically derived number that gave us  
the startup behaviour we wanted and it's well after the JVM has  
finished starting up so it couldn't be part of our startup since it's  
already done.

>
>
>> This means that objects created during that time period
>> aren't allowed to use biased locking.
>
> Throughout the whole lifetime?

Throughout the whole lifetime of that object.  Biased locking  
maintains state in the header of an object which says whether it can  
be biased or not.  The initial state is read from its the class  
object's Klass::_prototype_header field at allocation time and is  
written into the header word.  The biased locking startup delay works  
by having every classes initial state be not biasable and then after  
the delay expires they are all marked as biasable.  Every object  
allocated after that point will be biasable.  It's definitely an  
unsatisfying solution.

tom

>
>
> - Christian
>