> On Feb 8, 2016, at 5:46 AM, Peter Levart <peter.lev...@gmail.com> wrote: > If special-casing in ReferenceHandler is removed then an opportunity opens to > get rid of ReferenceHandler thread altogether. VM/GC could enqueue > Reference(s) to their respective ReferenceQueue(s) directly, so everyone > could enjoy the benefits sun.misc.Cleaner has…
I don't think that's likely. That would require the VM/GC to acquire all the queue locks, and we certainly wouldn't want to do that in a STW pause, so an intermediate thread is kind of unavoidable. [GC already needs to acquire the pending list lock, for interaction with the reference queue thread.] [Or change to lock-free enqueuing and wakeup of waiters, but I think the current preference would be to avoid pulling even something like that into a STW phase.]
