Re: Scavenging SRTs in scavenge_one

Thanks Simon, this is really helpful.

If you look at scavenge_fun_srt() and co, you'll see that they return immediately if !major_gc.

Thanks for pointing this out -- I didn't realize it's returning early when !major_gc and this caused a lot of confusion. Now everything makes sense. I'll add a note for scavenging SRTs and refer to it in relevant code and submit a diff. Ömer 2018-05-01 22:10 GMT+03:00 Simon Marlow :

Your explanation is basically right. scavenge_one() is only used for a non-major collection, where we aren't traversing SRTs. Admittedly this is a subtle point that could almost certainly be documented better, I probably just overlooked it.

More inline:

On 1 May 2018 at 10:26, Ömer Sinan Ağacan wrote:

...

I have an idea but it doesn't explain everything;

SRTs are used to collect CAFs, and CAFs are always added to the oldest generation's mut_list when allocated [1].

When we're scavenging a mut_list we know we're not doing a major GC, and because mut_list of oldest generation has all the newly allocated CAFs, which will be scavenged anyway, no need to scavenge SRTs for those.

Also, static objects are always evacuated to the oldest gen [2], so any CAFs that are alive but not in the mut_list of the oldest gen will stay alive after a non-major GC, again no need to scavenge SRTs to keep these alive.

This also explains why it's OK to not collect static objects (and not treat them as roots) in non-major GCs.

However this doesn't explain

- Why it's OK to scavenge large objects with scavenge_one().

I don't understand - perhaps you could elaborate on why you think it might not be OK? Large objects are treated exactly the same as small objects with respect to their lifetimes.

...

- Why we scavenge SRTs in non-major collections in other places (e.g. scavenge_block()).

If you look at scavenge_fun_srt() and co, you'll see that they return immediately if !major_gc.

...

Simon, could you say a few words about this?

Was that enough words? I have more if necessary :)

Cheers Simon

...

[1]: https://github.com/ghc/ghc/blob/master/rts/sm/Storage.c#L445-L449 [2]: https://github.com/ghc/ghc/blob/master/rts/sm/Scav.c#L1761-L1763

Ömer

2018-03-28 17:49 GMT+03:00 Ben Gamari :

...

Hi Simon,

I'm a bit confused by scavenge_one; namely it doesn't scavenge SRTs. It appears that it is primarily used for remembered set entries but it's not at all clear why this means that we can safely ignore SRTs (e.g. in the FUN and THUNK cases).

Can you shed some light on this?

Cheers,

- Ben

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