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Commit 3bc91b7a authored by Ben Gamari's avatar Ben Gamari
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nonmoving: Fix handling of dirty objects

Previously we (incorrectly) relied on failed_to_evac to be "precise".
That is, we expected it to only be true if *all* of an object's fields
lived outside of the non-moving heap. However, does not match the
behavior of failed_to_evac, which is true if *any* of the object's
fields weren't promoted (meaning that some others *may* live in the
non-moving heap).

This is problematic as we skip the non-moving write barrier for dirty
objects (which we can only safely do if *all* fields point outside of
the non-moving heap).

Clearly this arises due to a fundamental difference in the behavior
expected of failed_to_evac in the moving and non-moving collector.
e.g., in the moving collector it is always safe to conservatively say
failed_to_evac=true whereas in the non-moving collector the safe value
is false.

This issue went unnoticed as I never wrote down the dirtiness
invariant enforced by the non-moving collector. We now define this
invariant as

    An object being marked as dirty implies that all of its fields are
    on the mark queue (or, equivalently, update remembered set).

To maintain this invariant we teach nonmovingScavengeOne to push the
fields of objects which we fail to evacuate to the update remembered
set. This is a simple and reasonably cheap solution and avoids the
complexity and fragility that other, more strict alternative invariants
would require.

All of this is described in a new Note, Note [Dirty flags in the
non-moving collector] in NonMoving.c.
parent 0c7069c7
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1 merge request!3186Fix handling of dirty objects in non-moving GC
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