In psMarkSweepDecorator.cpp, the difference between two pointers is taken without using pointer_delta. This caused a crash when the size of the Java heap was greater than 2 Gb and operating in 32-bit mode. With a debug build, there is an assertion failure that says: "deadspace too big for Arrayoop".

#ifdef HP
        size_t sz = pointer_delta(end, q, sizeof(HeapWord*));
#else
        size_t sz = end - q;
#endif

java -Xms2000m -Xmx3400m -Xmn400m -XX:+UseParallelGC MaxOutMemory

import java.util.*;

public class MaxOutMemory {
  public MaxOutMemory() {
    System.out.println("Starting array allocation");
    Collection list = new ArrayList();
    try {
      for (int i = 0; i < 10000000; i++) {
        list.add(new String[100000]);
        if (i % 400 == 0) {
          System.out.println("Executing GC i=" + i);
          System.gc();
        }
      }
     }
    catch (Exception ex) {
      ex.printStackTrace();
    }

  }

  public static void main(String args[]) {
      MaxOutMemory m = new MaxOutMemory();

      System.exit(95);
  }
}

I could not reproduce this failure on a Sun machine because when I ran the test I got a different assert failure.

# Internal Error (/BUILD_AREA/jdk1.5.0/hotspot/src/share/vm/gc_implementation/p
arallelScavenge/psPromotionLAB.cpp, 134 [ Patched ]), pid=3859, tid=8
#
# Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) Server VM (1.5.0-b64-debug interpreted mode)
#
# Error: assert(_start_array->covered_region().contains(lab),"Sanity")
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