Ian Rogers - 29/Oct/07 03:28 AM We need to do this, it's a fundamental bit of underlying RVM design that is wrong. From my pov I think we need to associate statics with classes and possibly do something more akin to how JNI passes around classes with static methods. We still need the JTOC for certain literals, but some of these should be either associated with a class or class loader. The cost of this needn't be devastating as classes are literals that we can fold away. Obviously we also need to hang compiled methods off of classes/class loaders to make some of this work. It's likely to have quite severe performance implications. There is also the question as to whether we can use weak references to make the reclamation of the class loader automatic, or whether we need to hand craft GC support for unloading classes. I think this is a big job and shouldn't be scheduled for the release of 3.0 unless someone is prepared to take charge of it. Related issues from SF's RFE tracker: 1571462: Replace JTOC with per-classloader static segments https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1571462&group_id=128805&atid=712771 1571374: Type dictionaries should be per-classloader, not global https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1571374&group_id=128805&atid=712771 1147162: Reduce JTOC pressure of constants/static final fields https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1147162&group_id=128805&atid=712771

David Grove - 29/Oct/07 07:22 AM Moving off of 3.0 fix target. This is a major piece of re-engineering. We should do it, but we should also expect it to take months if we want to do it "right" since pretty much all of the global data structures of the VM would need to be redone to localize entries on a per-classloader basis. It will also have rippling impact on PPC, since it probably means we have to abandon the simple "all global data is in the jtoc" strategy and PPC doesn't have as efficient ISA support for address literals as IA32 does.

Ian Rogers - 10/Feb/08 02:11 AM The size of the hash maps in VM_Statics is causing us to go over the boot image size. Ideally we'd like to remove the hashmaps and just use an efficient search of the JTOC. We're discussing how literals should be organized. As literals are pulled in during the class loading process, possibly we want to think about how changes to the literals can fit in with class unloading.

Ian Rogers - 28/May/08 10:07 AM One way to handle literals is to place them with the code they represent, this would allow visibility using instruction pointer relative addressing.