Glossary of Maxine terminology and concepts

Welcome to the Maxine Glossary, a very informal and evolving set of brief notes to help orient newcomers to some of the terminology and concepts we use when talking about the Maxine VM. Please feel free to write to us with comments and suggestions. It is definitely a work in progress.

You might also want to browse the Maxine FAQ.

We thank our collaborators who have been contributing documentation as well; we link to it from this page and others whenever possible.

Alias

A specially marked field or method in a VM class that refers to a field or method in another class that would otherwise be inaccessible due to Java language access control rules. Used mainly for VM access to private members of JDK classes.

Read more.

Annotations

The Maxine VM code makes heavy use of Java Annotations as a form of language extension. These extensions, which are recognized and treated specially by the Maxine compilers, permit the kind of low-level, unsafe programming that is otherwise not possible with Java. By using the Java annotation mechanism, which is a first class part of the language, the Maxine sources are completely compatible with Java IDEs. See package com.sun.max.annotate.

Here are a few of the important Maxine annotations:

  • @ALIAS: denotes a field or method as an alias, which can be used to access a field or method in another class that would otherwise be inaccessible due to Java language access control rules.
  • @BUILTIN: denotes a method whose calls are translated directly by the compiler into machine code.
  • @C_FUNCTION: denotes a native function for which a lightweight JNI stub should be generated.
  • @CONSTANT_WHEN_NOT_ZERO: denotes a field whose value is final once it is non-zero.
  • @CONSTANT: denotes a field whose value is final before it’s first read (i.e. a stationary field).
  • @FOLD: calls to these methods are evaluated (as opposed to translated) at compile time.
  • @INLINE: forced inlining.
  • @INSPECTED: used by an offline tool to generate field and method accessors for the Maxine Inspector.
  • @METHOD_SUBSTITUTIONS: denotes a class containing. MethodSubstitutions
  • @NEVER_INLINE: denotes a method that this compiler must never inline.
  • @SUBSTITUTE: denotes a MethodSubstitution.
  • @UNSAFE: marks a method that requires special compilation; some other annotations imply @UNSAFE.

Boot heap

An object heap embedded in the VM boot image. It is a normal heap, with the exception that objects in it never move (although they may become permanent garbage). As the name implies, the objects in this heap are those allocated during boot image generation. The boot image is really just this heap plus a little meta-data in front.

Read more.

Bootstrap

The process of loading and executing a boot image of Maxine, up to the point where the VM is ready, either to execute a specified application class or other action specified by the run scheme.

Currently a boot image of Maxine is not a native executable but just a binary blob containing machine code and data for a dedicated target platform. Thus a boot image is not executable by itself. To start it a very small native C application is required.

See Boot Image.

Graal Compiler

See Graal.

Immortal memory

See the ImmortalHeap class as well as the various ImmortalHeap_* classes that test this functionality.

See class com.sun.max.vm.heap.ImmortalHeap

Injected fields

During startup the VM synthesizes and injects additional fields into core JDK classes. Injected fields typically link instances of JDK objects to their internal VM representation. Read more.

Maxine packages

A mechanism for treating groups of classes in Java package as a de facto “module” for purposes of system configuration and evolution. This requires implementing more functionality than is provided by the Java language via java.lang.Package.

This main application of this mechanism is to define the classes to be including during Maxine boot image generation, and in particular to specify which implementations to bind to VM schemes.

Strictly speaking, a Maxine package is a collection of classes in a Java package that includes a class named Package. The class Package must extend class com.sun.max.config.BootImagePackage in order to be considered for inclusion in the VM. The Package class, other than acting as a marker, may contain additional specifications directed at the Maxine package system. In many cases, however, trivial Package class can be synthesized dynamically and need not be explicitly defined.

Metacircular VM

In a conventional VM implementation (left in the figure below) there is a language barrier between the language being implemented (Java in the figure) and the implementation language (C++). No such barrier exists in Maxine, where the VM is itself implemented in the language being implemented.

_images/ConventionalMetacircular.jpg

See also: Ungar, D., Spitz, A., and Ausch, A. 2005. Constructing a metacircular Virtual machine in an exploratory programming environment. In Companion To the 20th Annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (San Diego, CA, USA, October 16 - 20, 2005). OOPSLA ‘05. ACM, New York, NY, 11-20. DOI

package-info.java

A documentation class, following Javadoc convention, for the classes and interfaces in a Java package; this is especially encouraged for packages that constitute Maxine package and serve as modules for VM configuration.

Package.java

A class used for configuration purposes by the Maxine Package mechanism.

ReferenceMapInterpreter

The ReferenceMapInterpreter performs an iterative data flow analysis via abstract interpretation. The following option maybe useful to watch it in action:

-XX:TraceRefMapInterpretationOf=<value>

The help message for this option is: “Trace ref map interpretation of methods whose name or declaring class contains .”

A short summary of its operation follows, contributed by Arian Treffer.

  • To collect GC roots, the GC needs to know which variable and stack slots in a stack frame contain references.
  • For the beginning of each code block, a bitmap (called “frame”) that indicates used reference slots is cached.
  • A block is a sequence of byte codes in a method that can be executed without jumping (out or into). A block either ends with a (implicit) fall through, a jump, or a return.
  • To create frames, the blocks are pseudo interpreted: their pop and push behavior is simulated. The slot configuration at the end of a block is the frame for all blocks that can be reached from here (2 in case of a conditional jump, 0 in case of a return, otherwise 1).
  • When a block can be reached from multiple other blocks, its frame is the intersection of the final slot configuration of its predecessors. If one predecessor stored a reference in a slot, and another did not, the current block may not read this slot, for it doesn’t know its contents.
  • The stack size at the beginning of a block is always the same. There is no Java code that first pushes N items (i.e. in a loop), and later pops them, even though this could be expressed with byte codes.
  • To get the slot configuration at the current execution point, the current block is interpreted again up until the current byte code, where the slot configuration is converted into a bitmap that indicates references on the current stack frame.

Stop positions

A list of call and safepoint instructions within a target method. These locations correspond to all possible addresses the instruction pointer of a frame may have when its thread is stopped at a safepoint. The location of all references on the stack are precisely known when at a stop position. See Threads.

T1X compiler

T1X is a template-based baseline compiler and is Maxine’s first line of execution (Maxine has no interpreter). As such, it’s primary goal is to produce code as fast as possible. Code quality is of secondary concern. It also closely matches the JVM specification’s execution models. That is, the JVM operand stack and local variable variable array is modeled directly. This makes it suitable for implementing bytecode level debugging as well being the execution mode the de-optimization process uses as its end target.

The templates for each bytecode instruction are written in Java (see T1XTemplateSource) and compiled to machine code by C1X (which is to be replaced by Graal). These machine code snippets are stored in a table and used to translate bytecodes at T1X compile time. The translation is done in a single pass (see T1XCompilation) and GC maps are lazily generated via an abstract interpreter at GC time. The latter strategy pays off as a GC map is only generated for a T1X compiled method if it is currently active during GC root scanning. Another strategy to improve compile time is to minimize allocation during compilation. This is achieved by (re)using thread local data structures for each compilation.

Having the templates written in Java makes modifying or extending the compiler fairly easy. More importantly, it also means the compiler is very portable and it mostly relies on the optimizing compiler. It performs very little direct machine code generation.

The source code for T1X is entirely contained in the top level T1X directory of the Maxine source code base.

Target method

A target method in the Maxine VM is the entity that contains some machine code produced by one of the compilers in Maxine. It also contains all the other data required by the VM for some machine code. In particular, target methods (implemented by heap objects in the class hierarchy rooted at TargetMethod.java) encapsulate the following information, including some that resides not in the heap but in the region of code cache memory allocated for the compilation.

  • Machine code, represented as a reference to a byte[] that is stored in the method’s code cache allocation.
  • Reference literals (optional, but common): represented as a reference to an Object[] that is stored in the method’s code cache allocation.
  • Scalar literals (optional, much less common): represented as a reference to a byte[] that is stored in the method’s code cache allocation.
  • Exception handler information. This is a data structure that can be used to answer the question “for an exception of type t thrown at position n in the target method, what is the position, if any, of an exception handler in the target method that will handle the thrown exception?”.
  • The stop positions. A stop is a machine code position for which extra information is known about the execution state at that position. There types of stop positions in Maxine and the information recorded for them are shown below:
    • Call. This is the position of a call (direct or indirect) instruction. For a call, the following is recorded:
      • Frame reference map. This is a bit map with one bit per slot in the frame of the method. A set bit in this bit map indicates that the corresponding frame slot holds an object reference at the call.
      • Java frame descriptor. This is a map from locations in the bytecode-level frame state to locations in the machine state. The bytecode level frame state is composed of the local variables and operand stack slots addressed by the JVM bytecodes from which the machine code was produced. The machine state is composed of frame slots, registers and immediate instruction operands. The mapping enables the JVM state to be completely reconstructed at the stop position. This is useful for implementing source level debugging and deoptimization.
    • Safepoint. This is the position of a safepoint instruction. For a safepoint, all the information described for a call is recorded as well as:
      • Register reference map. This is a bit map with one bit per register that can be used to store an object reference. This includes the complete set of general purpose registers for the platform but exclude all the floating point and state registers. Like a frame reference map, a set bit in the register reference map indicates that the corresponding register is holding an object reference at the safepoint.

[STRIKEOUT:Currently register reference maps are not recorded for calls as all registers are caller saved by the compilers in Maxine. This will mostly likely change in the near future as C1X will implement callee-save registers when compiling certain methods.] (Out of date?)

See abstract com.sun.max.vm.compiler.target.TargetMethod

Trampoline

The mechanism used to defer binding a call site to a target method. When compiling a call, an address is needed for the machine level call instruction. One option is to eagerly resolve the callee during compilation of the call but this will end up compiling the world! Instead, a piece of code is called that knows how to find and compile (if necessary) the intended target method and redirect the call there. For static calls, the call site itself is patched so that subsequent calls go straight to the resolved method. For virtual calls, the trampoline patches the entry in the relevant dispatch table.