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Re: question about if_marked construct



I can image a few ways to go from here:
- leave as is, fix this when it really bothers us (risk: exchange a known
problem for unknown hard-to-debug and/or hard-to-reproduce problems)
- instrument if_marked functions like the one for value_expr_for_decl to
assert if the from field is live and the to field is not live, and fix
the
asserts
- extend garbage colllector to handle the problematic case (problem: more
runtime and/or memory usage for garbage collection)
Any suggestions on which way to go?

Or make sure to walk all if_marked roots last (isn't the problem an ordering one only?)

That is already done. The problem is not what happens after that walk, but
during that walk. The code at that point assumes that the set of marked
non-hashtable-entry objects is already stable, while the problematic
if_marked functions have the effect that that set is enlarged during that
walk.

Hm, indeed - I know that this happens and it is not easy to avoid.


If we want to fix that in the garbage collector, we could walk the
problematic if_marked roots iteratively (without deleting unmarked entries),
until fixed point is reached. After that we would walk (and delete unmarked
entries) for both problematic and normal if_marked roots. However, I don't
have good idea how we can iterate to fixed-point efficiently.

Me neither. I suppose it would be nice to avoid the situation by dropping if_marked from problematic hashes. Can we at least somehow figure out which one are those? (for example by doing inefficient iteration with ENABLE_CHECKING and ICEing if the 2nd iteration changes anything?)

I also considered that check, and implemented it, but later wondered whether that method would only detect problems which surface given the actual order of traversal of hash-tables and entries, and leave other problems lurking.
So I created the following check: besides in_use_p and save_in_use_p, I created two other per page_entry bitmaps: root_marked_p and mark_locked_p. in_use_p is copied to root_marked_p after traversal of the root tab.
During traversal of the if_marked roots, whenever an if_marked field is tested and found unmarked, it is locked to unmarked by setting mark_locked_p.
This allows us to detect:
- when an object that is locked to unmarked, is marked (an entry is found dead and deleted, but later found live)
- when if_marked field is tested and found marked, but not root marked (an entry is live only thanks to the specific order in which we traverse over hash tables and hash table entries)


Tom


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