[project @ 2001-11-08 12:46:31 by simonmar]

[project @ 2001-11-08 12:46:31 by simonmar]
Fix the large block allocation bug (Yay!)
-----------------------------------------

In order to do this, I had to

 1. in each heap-check failure branch, return the amount of heap
    actually requested, in a known location (I added another slot
    in StgRegTable called HpAlloc for this purpose).  This is
    useful for other reasons - in particular it makes it possible
    to get accurate allocation statistics.

 2. In the scheduler, if a heap check fails and we wanted more than
    BLOCK_SIZE_W words, then allocate a special large block and place
    it in the nursery.  The nursery now has to be double-linked so
    we can insert the new block in the middle.

 3. The garbage collector has to be able to deal with multiple objects
    in a large block.  It turns out that this isn't a problem as long as
    the large blocks only occur in the nursery, because we always copy
    objects from the nursery during GC.  One small change had to be
    made: in evacuate(), we may need to follow the link field from the
    block descriptor to get to the block descriptor for the head of a
    large block.

 4. Various other parts of the storage manager had to be modified
    to cope with a nursery containing a mixture of block sizes.

Point (3) causes a slight pessimization in the garbage collector.  I
don't see a way to avoid this.  Point (1) causes some code bloat (a
rough measurement is around 5%), so to offset this I made the
following change which I'd been meaning to do for some time:

  - Store the values of some commonly-used absolute addresses
    (eg. stg_update_PAP) in the register table.  This lets us use
    shorter instruction forms for some absolute jumps and saves some
    code space.

  - The type of Capability is no longer the same as an StgRegTable.
    MainRegTable renamed to MainCapability.  See Regs.h for details.

Other minor changes:

  - remove individual declarations for the heap-check-failure jump
    points, and declare them all in StgMiscClosures.h instead.  Remove
    HeapStackCheck.h.

Updates to the native code generator to follow.