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  • Simon Marlow's avatar
    [project @ 2001-11-08 12:46:31 by simonmar] · 0671ef05
    Simon Marlow authored
    Fix the large block allocation bug (Yay!)
    -----------------------------------------
    
    In order to do this, I had to
    
     1. in each heap-check failure branch, return the amount of heap
        actually requested, in a known location (I added another slot
        in StgRegTable called HpAlloc for this purpose).  This is
        useful for other reasons - in particular it makes it possible
        to get accurate allocation statistics.
    
     2. In the scheduler, if a heap check fails and we wanted more than
        BLOCK_SIZE_W words, then allocate a special large block and place
        it in the nursery.  The nursery now has to be double-linked so
        we can insert the new block in the middle.
    
     3. The garbage collector has to be able to deal with multiple objects
        in a large block.  It turns out that this isn't a problem as long as
        the large blocks only occur in the nursery, because we always copy
        objects from the nursery during GC.  One small change had to be
        made: in evacuate(), we may need to follow the link field from the
        block descriptor to get to the block descriptor for the head of a
        large block.
    
     4. Various other parts of the storage manager had to be modified
        to cope with a nursery containing a mixture of block sizes.
    
    Point (3) causes a slight pessimization in the garbage collector.  I
    don't see a way to avoid this.  Point (1) causes some code bloat (a
    rough measurement is around 5%), so to offset this I made the
    following change which I'd been meaning to do for some time:
    
      - Store the values of some commonly-used absolute addresses
        (eg. stg_update_PAP) in the register table.  This lets us use
        shorter instruction forms for some absolute jumps and saves some
        code space.
    
      - The type of Capability is no longer the same as an StgRegTable.
        MainRegTable renamed to MainCapability.  See Regs.h for details.
    
    Other minor changes:
    
      - remove individual declarations for the heap-check-failure jump
        points, and declare them all in StgMiscClosures.h instead.  Remove
        HeapStackCheck.h.
    
    Updates to the native code generator to follow.
    0671ef05