RFR(S): 8039042: G1: Phantom zeros in cardtable

[Per Liden]

Thanks for reviewing Mikael, and thanks for the co-debugging this. 
Indeed an interesting bug :)

Still looking for a capital R review on this patch.

Thanks!
/Per

On 05/13/2014 02:41 PM, Mikael Gerdin wrote:
> Per,
>
> On Tuesday 13 May 2014 12.34.25 Per Liden wrote:
>> Summary: We use memset to initialize the cardtable. On Sparc T4 (and
>> later) memset uses some special instructions with the side-effect that
>> the memory can temporarily be filled with zeros before the actual value
>> is set. These phantom zeros can be observed by concurrent readers of
>> this memory, which can trick the G1 post-barrier to incorrectly dirty a
>> card in a young region. Please see the bug for a more details.
>>
>> A similar memset-problem has been observed and fixed before
>> (JDK-6948537) when using memset on the BlockOffsetTable. Similar to the
>> BlockOffsetTable, I'm using the UseMemSetInBOT flag as an indicator of
>> whether it's safe to use memset or not. UseMemSetInBOT is not a perfect
>> name for this flag as code other than the BOT might want to use it. It's
>> also questionable of this should be a command-line flag at all. I've
>> filed a separate RFE, JDK-8042930, to do a bit of clean up related to
>> this flag.
>>
>> Bug: https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8039042
>> Webrev: http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~pliden/8039042/webrev.0/
>
> The change looks good.
> A fun bug to investigate indeed :)
>
> I agree that setting of UseMemSetInBOT should be retired, we don't need a -XX:
> +RandomlyCrashOnSolarisSparc flag.
>
> /Mikael
>
>>
>> Thanks!
>> /Per
>