[fedora-java] rssowl: libgcj bugs that need fixing for it torun

[Boehm, Hans]

There is some code in earlier versions of the
GC to do thread registration, but it's very platform specific
and thus ugly.  I think there wasn't a real facility for Linux.

The tricky part of doing this in general is that the GC needs
to know the stack bounds for the newly registered thread.  It
can find the hot end, but the cold end is often hard.  GC7
addresses this by providing two ways to get the cold stack
end:

1) A generic mechanism that just takes the address of a local.
The collector knows how to implement that everywhere.  We just
provide a function that calls back one of your functions f with
a stack address that's guaranteed to be "below" f.  Since this
is not the actual base of the stack, the GC ends up tracing
pointers only in "new" frames.

2) A separate routine that tries to discover the stack base
in a platform dependent way.  It may fail.  (And currently
usually does.)  I think that for Linux, pthread_getattr_np
works for most threads, though perhaps not the main one.
(The thread pointer also probably works in many cases.)

I'm not sure the JNI primitives can be implemented in terms
of (1).  Certainly if you use CNI that has different semantics,
in that the GC doesn't see pointers "below" you on the stack.
We may need (2) to work for gcj.

Hans

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Robin Green [mailto:greenrd at greenrd.org] 
> Sent: Thursday, July 28, 2005 1:51 PM
> To: Anthony Green; Boehm, Hans
> Cc: tromey at redhat.com; Discussion list for java related 
> Fedora development
> Subject: RE: [fedora-java] rssowl: libgcj bugs that need 
> fixing for it torun
> 
> 
> > On Thu, 2005-07-28 at 11:34 -0700, Boehm, Hans wrote:
> > > [I missed the beginning of this thread initially.]
> > > 
> > > I'm actually trying to work on some of these issues.  Some status:
> > 
> > Cool.
> > 
> > Robin - is there a local hack/patch we can apply to swt 
> and/or rssowl 
> > to work around this problem until a real fix from Hans 
> migrates into 
> > GCC?
> 
> I'm a bit out of my depth here.
> 
> Hans wrote: "Gc7 (even the released, but very experimental 
> alpha3 version) has a thread registration interface." This 
> implies that the version in gcc _doesn't_ have a thread 
> registration interface, or anything that could be hacked 
> together into one. Is that surmise correct?
> 
> If so, the only other thing I can think of is to spawn a new 
> registered thread instead of calling AttachCurrentThread, and 
> somehow translate all C->Java invocations on the unregistered 
> thread into inter-thread calls onto the new registered 
> thread. In other words, keep all Java code on a separate thread. Yuck.
> 
> -- 
> Robin
>