RFR: Add NMT support for Java heap

[Aleksey Shipilev]

On 12/12/2017 01:06 PM, Per Liden wrote:
> On 2017-12-12 12:28, Aleksey Shipilev wrote:
>> But, this does look overly pessimistic thing to do. If there are multiple mappings that differ in
>> upper bits, that means there is enough unused space between the mappings, and we don't actually have
>> to reserve it?

Whaat I meant is: instead of allocating [0x0001...0x0005], we can reserve [0x00010...0,
0x00010050..0], [0x00020...0, 0x00020050..0], [0x00030...0, 0x00030050..0], etc, where the size of
each reserved chunk is -Xmx.

> We actually do want to reserve it anyway, for two reasons.
> 
> 1) In ZGC, by having a heap address spare much larger than the heap size we are essentially immune
> to address space fragmentation. I.e. we can always find a hole big enough for any allocation,
> without the need to first compact the heap.

Okay. I am quite a bit blurry on compaction that ZGC does. Does this mean the relocation phase
temporarily allocates target pages outside of currently reserved slice taken by Java heap? And you
want to have enough spare so that you always have contiguous virtual memory to allocate that
temporary excess at? If so, you can allocate another -Xmx-sized chunk, without always reserving
terabytes of space, right?

> 2) CollectedHeap::is_in_reserved() is often used as a inexpensive check if something point into the
> heap. By reserving all addresses in all heap views this check remains inexpensive as we know that
> some other random mmap() call in the VM didn't end up in-between two heap views. 

is_in_reserved() is the compelling argument. Although you can probably just mask out high-bits and
land in the first mapping. The mappings of the same size would make this work.

> This is also very useful when debugging. For example, when dumping memory or looking at stack
> traces you can easily see if something is an oop or not (oops always start with 0x00001...,
> 0x000008... or 0x000004...).

Yes, this does not go away: the starts of each reserved chunk stays the same.

Thanks,
-Aleksey