[11u] RFR(S): 8241234: Unify monitor enter/exit runtime entries.

[Andrew Haley]

Hi,

On 27/08/2020 11:04, Doerr, Martin wrote:
>
>> Why is anyone backporting a P4 Enhancement? Seems weird.

> This is a good question in general. Personally, I'd vote for
> backporting fewer less important things to 11u in the future. We
> should better focus on 17 IMHO.
>
> However, there are some arguments for backporting this one:
> - Oracle has done so. There may be more backports in this area and
> I'd expect less effort if we have the same code in the open version.
> - Performance is supposed to be better. (Though I didn't measure it.)
> - New code is much cleaner. Let's keep in mind that we have to
> support it for quite a while.
>
> Are you ok with it?

I'm unsure. While "Oracle has backported it" has been a slam-dunk
justification for many patches, I am concerned about the destabilizing
effect of the volume of patches we are processing.

"Better performance" is not in itself justification for a backport
unless the improvement is really compelling.

"Cleanups" are a red flag. The miserable history of code that has been
broken by seemingly innocuous cleanups is long. This is a big change
that affects some very delicate code, but the fact that there is
already a GraalVM patch we can use is quite persuasive.

So I'm not refusing it, I want people's opinions.

-- 
Andrew Haley  (he/him)
Java Platform Lead Engineer
Red Hat UK Ltd. <https://www.redhat.com>
https://keybase.io/andrewhaley
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