[Vm-dev] Reproducible Cog crash from image startup

Igor Stasenko siguctua at gmail.com
Tue Feb 28 17:26:01 UTC 2012


investigating a bit further..
actually #markAndTrace:
is the only sender of
 self lastPointerOf: oop recordWeakRoot: true.

the another sender of it is #startObj, inlined into markAndTrace:
itself, but with false argument.
So, it means that only "roots" are affected by this bug, an entry
points where VM using this method to start tracing objects graph.
The bug uncovers itself only in cases like with Nautilus, which having
too deep (but could be finite) stack,
with references to weak objects on it, because
#markAndTraceStackPage: using #markAndTrace: for all oops on stack,
which contributes to weak roots table.

I suspecting that markAndTraceStackPage: don't needs to record roots,
because stack page , despite it is not a regular object oh heap
 actually acts as a root, and won't be GCed, because it is already reachable:
(self assert: (stackPages isFree: thePage) not.)

which means that recording every weak object found on stack as weak
root probably an overkill (you don't do it for regular ones ,isnt?).
this is easy to modify, by adding extra keyword to #markAndTrace:
passing whether it should record the incoming oop as weak root or not,
instead of always assume "true"
Because indeed,
the weak roots table size is calculated by
	WeakRootTableSize := RootTableSize + RemapBufferSize + 100.

but it doesn't takes into account an arbitrary depth of stack :)

Here the code to crash VM (attached):

It crashes my VM stably at depth ~ 1450

CrashMe new crashMe: 1450

(as i said before , you need only a half of weak roots table to get
things overflowing...
WeakRootTableSize  2625

-- 
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: CrashMe.st
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 618 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/vm-dev/attachments/20120228/20b4b734/CrashMe.obj


More information about the Vm-dev mailing list