This patch decreases the memory used by the helgrind SecMap,
by implementing a Garbage Collection for the SecMap.
The basic change is that freed memory is marked as noaccess
(while before, it kept the previous marking, on the basis that
non buggy applications are not accessing freed memory in any case).
Keeping the previous marking avoids the CPU/memory changes needed
to mark noaccess.
However, marking freed memory noaccess and GC the secmap reduces
the memory on big apps.
For example, a firefox test needs 220Mb less (on about 2.06 Gb).
Similar reduction for libreoffice batch (260 MB less on 1.09 Gb).
On such applications, the performance with the patch is similar to the trunk.
There is a performance decrease for applications that are doing
a lot of malloc/free repetitively: e.g. on some perf tests, an increase
in cpu of up to 15% has been observed.
Several performance optimisations can be done afterwards to not loose
too much performance. The decrease of memory is expected to produce
in any case significant benefit in memory constrained environments
(e.g. android phones).
So, after discussion with Julian, it was decided to commit as-is
and (re-)gain (part of) performance in follow-up commits.
git-svn-id: svn://svn.valgrind.org/valgrind/trunk@15207 a5019735-40e9-0310-863c-91ae7b9d1cf9
9 files changed
