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
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
