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  1. JDK
  2. JDK-8227254

Optionally preallocate buffer to make error handling more stable on native OOM

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    • Enhancement
    • Resolution: Won't Fix
    • P4
    • tbd
    • 14
    • hotspot

    Description

      A number of error reporting steps require memory. When we are out of memory, those steps may fail.

      A prominent example is NMT: NMT detailed reports would be super helpful in analyzing native OOMs (see also: JDK-8227031). However, to create that report NMT needs memory from C-Heap. If C-Heap is exhausted, report fails or crashes.

      Other examples include stacktrace printing, which on some platforms invokes ElfDecoder to print symbol names, which needs C-Heap as well.

      In a perfect world we would harden everything destined to be running inside error handling, e.g. to work with pre-allocated buffers, or to not allocate memory at all. But that is difficult (not impossible) and increases complexity, which is undesired.

      A pragmatic solution would be:

      - allocate a "ballast" buffer from C-Heap on VM startup
      - on native OOM, "drop" that ballast by free()ing the buffer. This returns the memory back to the C-lib allocator, reduces the memory pressure and hopefully enables the few error reporting steps which need C-Heap to finish successfully.

      Of course there is absolutely no guarantee that this works - code running concurrently may gobble the memory up the instant we release it, for instance.
       
      However, this is pragmatic and dead simple to implement and in practice works surprisingly well. A hack such as this did often help us to get an NMT detail report in an OOM situation where otherwise we would have gotten nothing.

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              stuefe Thomas Stuefe
              stuefe Thomas Stuefe
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