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Welcome to the Shenandoah Project!

Shenandoah is an ultra-low pause time garbage collector that reduces GC pause times by performing more garbage collection work concurrently with the running Java program. CMS and G1 both perform concurrent marking of live objects. Shenandoah adds concurrent compaction.

Build and Run

Shenandoah is under development. There are several ways to try it:

Build the bleeding edge from the JDK 9 source. This would guarantee you run the latest and greatest version. Adding --enable-debug to configure would produce the "fastdebug" build.

$ hg clone http://hg.openjdk.java.net/shenandoah/jdk9 shenandoah-jdk9
$ cd shenandoah-jdk9/
$ sh ./get_sources.sh
$ sh ./configure
$ make images
$ build/linux-x86_64-normal-server-release/images/jdk/bin/java -XX:+UseShenandoahGC -Xlog:gc
[...][info][gc] Using Shenandoah

Build the JDK 8 backport: same as above, but change "jdk9" to "jdk8u" in the paths above. The advantage is that you don't need to figure out JDK 9 compatibility issues for your application first (although it is a good idea to try JDK 9 now anyway). The downside is, that forest may easily be several months behind the JDK 9 version. If you encounter trouble with JDK 8 version, please try JDK 9 version.

$ hg clone http://hg.openjdk.java.net/shenandoah/jdk8 shenandoah-jdk8
$ cd shenandoah-jdk8/
$ sh ./get_sources.sh
$ sh ./configure
$ make images
$ build/linux-x86_64-normal-server-release/j2sdk-image/bin/java -XX:+UseShenandoahGC -version
openjdk version "1.8.0-internal"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0-internal-shade_2016_12_19_15_52-b00)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.71-b00, mixed mode)

Pick up the binary build from AdoptOpenJDK (jdk8, jdk9 – look at the publish dates, the builds might be outdated), or others (e.g. builds.shipilev.net).

In some Linux distros, Shenandoah is available within the IcedTea binaries. The caveat is that those may lag behind the current development version even more.

Fedora 24/25:

$ cat /etc/redhat-release 
Fedora release 25 (Twenty Five)
$ java -XX:+UseShenandoahGC -version
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM warning: Compressed Oops not supported with ShenandoahGC
openjdk version "1.8.0_111"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_111-b16)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.111-b16, mixed mode)

Gentoo ebuilds for IcedTea have Shenandoah USE flag.

Helpful Hints for Early Adopters/Developers

-Xlog:gc=info would print the individual GC timings, as would most recent GCs with JDK 9 Unified Logging.
-Xlog:gc+stats would print the summary table on Shenandoah internal timings at the end of the run.
If you suspect a GC bug, it is a very good idea to run with "fastdebug" builds. These can be produced by adding --enable-debug to configure, and building. Shenandoah asserts a lot of things, and it usually reveals a lot about the issue.
If you suspect a JIT bug – and there are lots of Shenandoah-specific optimizations -- it is a very good idea to try bisect which compiler failed by trying several VM modes: -Xint (interpreter only), -XX:TieredStopAtLevel=1 (C1 only), -XX:-TieredCompilation (interpreter and C2 only), default (interpreter, tiered C1, tiered C2).
If you suspect a bug in concurrent phases, read/write barriers, etc., try running with -XX:ShenandoahGCHeuristics=passive, which will do the stop-the-world mark-compact GCs only.
GC bugs can be shaken out more quickly with -XX:ShenandoahGCHeuristics=aggressive, which runs back-to-back GCs. Since Shenandoah does most GC heavy-lifting concurrently, this does not block application from executing, although GC would consume much more cycles in this mode and slow the application down.

Bug reports are welcome at the mailing list.

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