A method specialisation and virtualised execution environment for Java

Abstract

We present a virtualisation and method specialisation framework for Java that facilitates efficient, dynamic modification of the behaviour of object accesses at run time. The technique works by virtualising all method calls and field accesses associated with selected classes so that all corresponding object accesses are via the invocation of a virtual method. Different access behaviours are then supported by allowing arbitrary specialisations of those methods to be defined. The virtualisation overheads are partially recovered by allowing the JVM's optimisation subsystem to perform guarded inlining of specialised methods. We describe an implementation based on the Jikes RVM and show how the framework can be used to implement an 'implicit' read barrier that supports incremental garbage collection. The performance overhead of full virtualisation, and the performance of the implicit read barrier compared with an existing conventional, explicit barrier, are evaluated using SPEC JVM98 and DaCapo benchmarks. The net virtualisation costs are shown to be remarkably low and the implicit barrier is shown to outperform the explicit barrier substantially in most cases. Other potential applications, including object proxying, caching, and relocation, and instrumentation are also discussed.