Initial runtime support for the ValueTypes attribute

[Frederic Parain]

Karen,

Your comment made me think that I wanted too much
to rush this code out for the JIT team. It needed some
clean up first and more consistency.

Regarding arrays, so far, we haven’t identify any array optimization that
would require pre-loading. The element type is loading just before creating
the array, and it is sufficient to implement our current optimization (array flattening)

Here’s a new webrev:
http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~fparain/VTAttribute/webrev.01/index.html

Changes:
  - pre-loading code for flattenable fields in the link phase has been removed:
    this pre-loading is already performed at load time when fields layout is computed.
  - error detection and handling has been improved and made consistent between
    pre-loading for flattenable fields and pre-loading for method arguments
  - comments have been update

To summarize:
  - at load time: pre-loading of flattenable fields types
  - at link time: pre-loading of method arguments and return types
  - at execution time: regular loading of element types for array

Error Handling:
  - If a field has the ACC_FLATTENABLE flag set but its type is not listed in
    the ValueTypes attribute, an ClassFormatError is thrown
  - If a class is pre-loaded but it is not a value class, an ICCE is thrown

Thanks,

Fred


> On May 18, 2018, at 10:16, Karen Kinnear <KAREN.KINNEAR at ORACLE.COM> wrote:
> 
> Frederic,
> 
> Code looks really good. Many thanks for doing this so quickly and carefully.
> Thank you for the symbol refcount handling.
> 
> Summary:
>  declared fields (static and instance): preload, i.e. classfileparser loads before completing container loading
>  linkage to fields and methods, we load at link time prior to creation of vtables/itables
> 
> - this all sounds correct to me.
> 
> instanceKlass.cpp: 621
>  - comment is that arrays of value types are not handled
>  - do we actually need to preload arrays of value types at link time for any optimizations?
> 
> Empty.java: line 40: Excepted -> Expected
> 
> thanks,
> Karen
> 
>> On May 17, 2018, at 4:04 PM, Frederic Parain <frederic.parain at oracle.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Please review this first patch related to the ValueTypes attribute:
>> 
>> http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~fparain/VTAttribute/webrev.00/
>> 
>> The patch includes:
>> - the parsing of the ValueTypes attribute
>> - the creation of meta-data from this attribute
>> - a consistency check between the ACC_FLATTENABLE flag
>>   and the ValueTypes attribute
>> - the pre-loading of method arguments types and return values types
>> 
>> Fred
>> 
>