4965777: GC changes to support use of discovered field for pending references Summary: If and when the reference handler thread is able to use the discovered field to link reference objects in its pending list, so will GC. In that case, GC will scan through this field once a reference object has been placed on the pending list, but not scan that field before that stage, as the field is used by the concurrent GC thread to link discovered objects. When ReferenceHandleR thread does not use the discovered field for the purpose of linking the elements in the pending list, as would be the case in older JDKs, the JVM will fall back to the old behaviour of using the next field for that purpose. Reviewed-by: jcoomes, mchung, stefank

Merge

7085906: Replace the permgen allocated sentinelRef with a self-looped end Summary: Remove the sentinelRef and let the last Reference in a discovered chain point back to itself. Reviewed-by: ysr, jmasa

7050392: G1: Introduce flag to generate a log of the G1 ergonomic decisions Summary: It introduces ergonomic decision logging in G1 for the following heuristics: heap sizing, collection set construction, concurrent cycle initiation, and partially-young GC start/end. The code has a bit of refactoring in a few places to make the decision logging possible. It also replaces alternative ad-hoc logging that we have under different parameters and switches (G1_DEBUG, G1PolicyVerbose). Reviewed-by: johnc, ysr