[kaffe] A GC question
Ceyhun ÖZGÜN
ceyhun_ozgun at hotmail.com
Sat Mar 18 04:22:17 PST 2006
Hi,
I have downloaded the sources and I was looking sources.
I have a question in my mind about garbage collection.
softcall_new(stack(0), class_object());
#defined softcall_new(r, t) (r)->v.taddr = soft_new(t)
soft_new(Hjava_lang_Class* c)
{
Hjava_lang_Object* obj;
errorInfo info;
if (c->state != CSTATE_COMPLETE && processClass(c, CSTATE_COMPLETE, &info)
== false) {
goto bad;
}
obj = newObjectChecked(c, &info);
if (obj == 0) {
goto bad;
}
DBG(NEWINSTR,
dprintf("New object of type %s (%d,%p)\n",
c->name->data, c->bfsize, obj); )
return (obj);
bad:
throwError(&info);
return (0);
}
In the source above it allocates an object and pushes it to the stack.
My question is, what if the thread that allocated the object is preempted
right after the allocation and before pushing it to the stack.
And scheduler switches to an another thread and that thread needs garbage
collection.
The garbage collector searches the roots (stack and frames etc) for
references and it can not find any references because obj reference it is
not pushed on the stack yet.
So collector collects the newly allocated object and obj pointer in first
thread becomes a ghost pointer. And later first thread runs and uses an
deallocated area, possibly an area that belongs to an another object.
And this situation is very bad.
I have a solution in my mind, but I think it is not the best solution.
Marking the object as NOT_USED in allocation and clearing that mark first
access (assigning to stack, a local var, or a field of class/object).
I have looked at Sun JDK sources (1.3, 1.4) and I did not see any workaround
for this.
What do you think?
Thanks for advance.
Ceyhun ÖZGÜN
_________________________________________________________________
Siz siz olun MSN'den hava durumunu ögrenmeden evden çikmayin!
http://www.msn.com.tr/havadurumu/
More information about the kaffe
mailing list