Given a call frame F of size N where the return values start at offset R,
callwritebarrier was instructing heapBitsBulkBarrier to scan the block
of memory [F+R, F+R+N). It should only scan [F+R, F+N). The extra N-R
bytes scanned might lead into the next allocated block in memory.
Because the scan was consulting the heap bitmap for type information,
scanning into the next block normally "just worked" in the sense of
not crashing.
Scanning the extra N-R bytes of memory is a problem mainly because
it causes the GC to consider pointers that might otherwise not be
considered, leading it to retain objects that should actually be freed.
This is very difficult to detect.
Luckily, juju turned up a case where the heap bitmap and the memory
were out of sync for the block immediately after the call frame, so that
heapBitsBulkBarrier saw an obvious non-pointer where it expected a
pointer, causing a loud crash.
Why is there a non-pointer in memory that the heap bitmap records as
a pointer? That is more difficult to answer. At least one way that it
could happen is that allocations containing no pointers at all do not
update the heap bitmap. So if heapBitsBulkBarrier walked out of the
current object and into a no-pointer object and consulted those bitmap
bits, it would be misled. This doesn't happen in general because all
the paths to heapBitsBulkBarrier first check for the no-pointer case.
This may or may not be what happened, but it's the only scenario
I've been able to construct.
I tried for quite a while to write a simple test for this and could not.
It does fix the juju crash, and it is clearly an improvement over the
old code.