RFR: 8225716: G1 GC: Undefined behaviour in G1BlockOffsetTablePart::block_at_or_preceding

Andrew Haley aph at redhat.com
Mon Jun 17 09:42:16 UTC 2019


On 6/14/19 8:54 PM, Peter B. Kessler wrote:
>> Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2019 14:06:22 +0200
>> From: Thomas Schatzl <thomas.schatzl at oracle.com>
>> To: Andrew Haley <aph at redhat.com>, "hotspot-gc-dev openjdk.java.net"
>> 	<hotspot-gc-dev at openjdk.java.net>
>> Subject: Re: RFR: 8225716: G1 GC: Undefined behaviour in
>> 	G1BlockOffsetTablePart::block_at_or_preceding
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> On Thu, 2019-06-13 at 16:21 +0100, Andrew Haley wrote:
>>> [...]
>>> The bug has only ever been observed on 86-32, but it isn't a
>>> target-specific bug. It's probably not specific to G1 either.
>>
>> The other generational collector use similar code that apparently also
>> assume volatile access in
>> BlockOffsetArrayNonContigSpace::block_start_unsafe. While this is not
>> issues for Serial obviously, it may be for Parallel/CMS and needs to be
>> looked at too.
>> [...]
>
> ParallelGC only updates the block offset table when copying objects.
> Copying is to a destination claimed by a GC worker, so no other GC
> thread is reading that part of the BOT while it is being written.
> 
> CMS does not move objects in the old generation, so the BOT for an
> object does not change once the object is in place.  I don't know
> what CMS does if it has to defragment the heap by running a
> compacting collection.
> 
> If I recall correctly: it has been a while since I looked at any of
> that code.  It would be a shame to make access to the BOT volatile/
> atomic for the collectors that do not need that overhead.  Your
> memory system will thank you for your attention to this detail.

Would it really matter? These are relaxed accesses, so there are no
memory fence instructions emitted. The only difference would be that
rematerialization of a BOT element would be inhibited in the case
where it could not be kept in a register. Instead, it'd have to be
spilled, but only if registers were in very short supply. So, the cost
is more or less nothing.

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