Summary: For current soft-ref clearing policies, we can decide at marking time if a soft-reference will definitely not be cleared, postponing the decision of whether it will definitely be cleared to the final reference processing phase. This can be especially beneficial in the case of concurrent collectors where the marking is usually concurrent but reference processing is usually not.
Reviewed-by: jmasa

Reviewed-by: tonyp, jmasa, apetrusenko

Reviewed-by: iveresov, tonyp

Reviewed-by: jmasa

Summary: allocate alignment-sized page(s) below java heap so that memory accesses at heap_base+1page give signal and cause an implicit null check
Reviewed-by: kvn, jmasa, phh, jcoomes

Reviewed-by: jmasa, apetrusenko

Summary: avoid computing the dense prefix if a space is empty
Reviewed-by: pbk, tonyp

Reviewed-by: ysr, pbk

Summary: Maintain a high water mark for the allocations in a space and mangle only up to that high water mark.
Reviewed-by: ysr, apetrusenko

Summary: Update copyright year for files that have been modified in 2008
Reviewed-by: ohair, tbell

Summary: ensure that GCTask threads release resource and handle memory
Reviewed-by: jmasa, chrisphi

Summary: Compressed oops in instances, arrays, and headers. Code contributors are coleenp, phh, never, swamyv
Reviewed-by: jmasa, kamg, acorn, tbell, kvn, rasbold

6539517: CR 6186200 should be extended to perm gen allocation to prevent spurious OOM's from perm gen
Reviewed-by: ysr, jmasa

Reviewed-by: apetrusenko