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  1. JDK
  2. JDK-8061564

Suspicious failure of test java/util/concurrent/Phaser/FickleRegister.java

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      This test failure exposed a number of issues with the logic in unsafe.cpp for handling atomic updates of Java long fields on platforms without any direct support for a 64-bit CAS operations - platforms for which supports_cx8 is not true.

      What the unsafe code did was to use the object containing the field as a lock object for reading and writing the field. This seems reasonable on the surface but in fact had a fatal flaw - because we were locking a Java-level visible object inside what was considered to be a lock-free code-path by the application and library logic, we could actually induce a deadlock - which is why the test failed.

      In addition the code had two further flaws:

      1. Because the field could also be updated via direct assignment in Java code the unsafe code needed to perform an Atomic::load of the field. And for good measure we also employ an Atomic::store to ensure no interference with direct reads of the field in Java code.

      2. The address of the field was being calculated before using the ObjectLocker to lock the object, but locking could encounter a safepoint check allowing the object to relocated by the GC, and we would then use a stale address.

      To fix all of this we:
      - introduce a special Mutex to use instead of the deadlock-inducing Java object
      - use Atomic::load and Atomic::store to access the jlong field
      - avoid safepoints when locking (alternatively you could ensure you calculate the address after acquiring the lock )

            dholmes David Holmes
            dkononenko Denis Kononenko
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