Loop over valid pointer locations in heap objects instead of checking if each location is valid.
The conservative scanning code is now shared between markRoots and the heap scan.
This also removes the ending alignment requirement from markRoots, since the new scan* functions do not require an aligned length.
This requirement was occasionally violated by the linux global marking code.
This saves some code space and has negligible impact on performance.
The blocks GC originally used a fixed-size stack to hold objects to scan.
When this stack overflowed, the GC would fully rescan all marked objects.
This could cause the GC to degrade to O(n^2) when scanning large linked data structures.
Instead of using a fixed-size stack, we now add a pointer field to the start of each object.
This pointer field is used to implement an unbounded linked stack.
This also consolidates the heap object scanning into one place, which simplifies the process.
This comes at the cost of introducing a pointer field to the start of the object, plus the cost of aligning the result.
This translates to:
- 16 bytes of overhead on x86/arm64 with the conservative collector
- 0 bytes of overhead on x86/arm64 with the precise collector (the layout field cost gets aligned up to 16 bytes anyway)
- 8 bytes of overhead on other 64-bit systems
- 4 bytes of overhead on 32-bit systems
- 2 bytes of overhead on AVR
This implements the block-based GC as a partially precise GC. This means
that for most heap allocations it is known which words contain a pointer
and which don't. This should in theory make the GC faster (because it
can skip non-pointer object) and have fewer false positives in a GC
cycle. It does however use a bit more RAM to store the layout of each
object.
Right now this GC seems to be slower than the conservative GC, but
should be less likely to run out of memory as a result of false
positives.
Damian Gryski
Nia Waldvogel
dkegel-fastly
Anuraag Agrawal
Ayke van Laethem