[SqF]Report of VI4 Project for Apr '02
Rob Withers
rwithers12 at attbi.com
Wed Apr 10 04:23:53 UTC 2002
Peter Crowther <peter.crowther at networkinference.com> wrote:
> It does. But SmallIntegers are never in headers, and headers (by
> definition) are never in object bodies where they can be confused with
> SmallIntegers. So all is well.
I wish I had looked at the comment for ObjectMemory, before I crawled
through all that code to figure it out. :) I had completely forgotten
about the existence of pointers as well, but sure enough we have them.
I think I've passed another stage and am fast approaching my black belt.
I was able to completely forget that pointers ever existed!
This must mean that there is a black hole in the address space since
only half of memory is addressable. I'm at 1.5 GB and while I'm
comfortable there, I may want to run squeak in a larger address space.
Do you know if anyone has done a 64-bit port?
>
> The GC does, indeed, trash three bits at the bottom of the headers; it also
> goes to considerable lengths to put them back correctly after collection.
Darn, then I can't blame the occasional glitch in my redirector vm on
this.
> I looked into this stuff about three years ago when I wanted to add a
> security header to all/most object headers. It reminds me of a very, very
> precisely engineered internal combustion engine: it all works reliably until
> you touch something. Then it blows up and scatters bits all over the object
> memory (if you're lucky; I've had them land over a much wider range :-).
How did that work? A 4th header word if some bit was set? I was
thinking about adding the extra ccIndex bit to the header type, but then
I read about the suggestion to make Context a format type. It sounds
like some special objects can be encoded there, and if we include this
check in #fetchClassOf: we could combine ccIndex and object format and
free up several bits in the process.
For my needs I could use either a bit or a format, but a change in
header structure may warrent a bit. So how about a bit for custom
lookup. This would add an extra header word, that would be a pointer or
handle to a message lookup function. We could use the same technique to
specify a foreign address header word with a LOOM bit. One of these cases
may be able to reuse the class pointer. (and yes there is an extra hash bit
as well :)
The base header layout could be:
29-31 3 bits reserved for gc (mark, old, dirty)
16-28 13 bits object hash (for HashSets)
15 1 bit LOOM bit
14 1 bit custom lookup
13 1 bit read-only
8-12 5 bits object format
2-7 6 bits object size in 32-bit words
0-1 2 bits header type (0: 3-word, 1: 2-word, 2: forbidden, 3: 1-word)
Rob
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