gc(policy): the ArenaBytes major trigger and its consumers measure old space, not the copying nursery's reserved capacity

[proggeramlug]

Runtime-only, on main 616a2cb84. Written by codex from the campaign's major-cycle and allocation accounting on cc; not yet compiled (the authoring host had no disk) — perrymaster's gate ladder and rows will be appended here. GC-adjacent: needs run-extended-tests.

Why

On cc (4-turn 3300-char replies, PERRY_GC_DIAG), every budgeted major cycle inside a turn is armed by ArenaBytes (arena_total ≥ next_base) while old-space reclaimable sits at its baseline — nothing new to reclaim in old space. arena_total counts the copying nursery's reserved from-space capacity, so a nursery filling toward its cap crosses the base by itself. The cycle's cost is not the old-gen mark (5–7 ms for 50–65 MB of old space) but sweeping 46–64 MB of dead Eden bytes in place (69 % of the cycle, ~85 ms each): the copying minor's work done the expensive way, ≈ 50 ms of mutator charge per turn on the default nursery and more on larger ones. Everything on cc allocates through the nursery; old space grows only by promotion (0.1–1.5 MB per turn). The same nursery-inclusive quantity made #9838's tiny-parse guard read a large nursery as pressure (up to 159 non-collecting forced-collection requests in one turn), and the adaptive tenuring arm's turn-1 excursion (TN4) is this cycle armed by the arena crossing its S=2 startup minors shift.

What changes (a unit change, not a threshold change)

• ARENA_TOTAL_BYTES gains NURSERY_RESERVED_BYTES, the reserved capacity owned by Eden and both survivor semispaces, maintained where blocks are created, reset, released and quarantined; in-place promotion transfers capacity from the nursery counter to old so promotion is visible as old-space growth.
• old_space_total_bytes() = arena_total − nursery reserved. The ArenaBytes predicate compares it with the armed base; the rebaseline (next_base; the 16 MiB headroom floor and the adaptive step, ceiling and promotion-runway credit are untouched), the debt scaling, the tiny-parse pressure test and the explicit memory-pressure clamp use the same quantity; idle right-sizing evaluates old-space live bytes against old-space capacity with its existing rules. Nursery occupancy stays owned by the young-scavenge cap and is handed to a copying minor. The safepoint deferral slack valve remains whole-arena by design (it bounds RSS while a collection waits and does not arm).
• Diag: [gc-trigger] prints arena_total=, the old_total= actually compared and nursery_excluded=; [gc-budgeted] start prints arming_reason= with the same totals; [gc-arena-rebaseline] prints the old-space total and the excluded nursery capacity on one line.

Tests (named; sabotage stated in the campaign report; not yet executed)

arena_trigger_old_space: a nursery filled with dead objects to the real cap crosses whole-arena bytes but not old bytes, arms no budgeted cycle, and the next copying minor reclaims it (restoring arena_total_bytes() in the comparison fails it); promotion past the unchanged headroom with an empty nursery arms exactly one cycle (removing the nursery-counter transfer in promotion fails it); the bounded idle-window right-size test kept with its sabotage named. Existing trigger, rebaseline, debt-pacer, copying-survival, host-safepoint, arena-right-size and idle-reclaim coverage updated only where its unit is now old-space capacity.

Predictions (falsifiers on the cc 4-turn diag run vs main)

Budgeted cycles armed by ArenaBytes with old-space reclaimable at baseline: 3 → 0 per run; in-turn budgeted mutator charge 169–213 ms → ≈ 0; minors per turn and old-space occupancy unchanged; idle-window reclaim unchanged; non-collecting tiny-parse requests → ≈ 0; paired turn CPU ≈ −2 % at 3300 and more at 400; peak and settled RSS unchanged or lower. Two consequences to measure on the same runtime: a 64 MB nursery no longer arms majors (NS2's +13 % peak), and the adaptive tenuring arm's turn-1 major should disappear without a lock change.

Gate history

• 008fa075d picked onto main 504e180d0 on perrymaster: default build green, archive feature set green, nm 2951 exports present; runtime suite 3231 passed / 1 failed / 4 ignored — 7 of the 8 named tests green (both arena_right_size families, the idle right-size test, and full_dead_nursery_does_not_arm_budgeted_cycle_and_next_minor_reclaims_it, i.e. the arming side works). The failure is this PR's own promotion_past_old_space_headroom_arms_one_budgeted_cycle_with_empty_nursery at arena_trigger_old_space.rs:145: "promotion transfers capacity without reserving more" left 19 922 944 right 18 874 368 — exactly one BLOCK_SIZE — reproducible alone. Either the nursery-reserved counter misses one block-creation arm, or the in-place promotion reserves a fresh old head the expectation must state. Follow-up in progress; the same test is being run on the branch's own base to separate a bookkeeping miss from a base difference. No rows yet.
• 0fa6101bb (this head's code): the one-block delta was by construction — reset_young_after_promotion reserves a mandatory fresh 1 MiB Eden head after transferring the filled nursery blocks to old space — so the test now expects exactly one new block and asserts more precisely: the nursery's capacity after promotion equals exactly the replacement Eden head, and old-space pacing gains exactly the promoted capacity. The same failure reproduced on the branch's own base, and no relevant commit exists between that base and the measurement base. Local gates on this head: the exact test 1 passed; runtime suite 3261 passed, 0 failed, 4 ignored; archive feature-set build green; default compiler build green; rustfmt, diff and file-size checks green. Perrymaster runs its ladder and the rows next.

Measured — AT2 (perrymaster, main 504e180d0 + this PR's two commits, runtime relinked on main's cache; gate green: suite 3232/0, all 8 named tests, 92 family tests, nm)

The change does what it says: on a 4-turn 3300-char run the budgeted cycles go 3 → 0 (main: startup ArenaBytes full 292 ms + turn-1 94 ms + turn-3 95 ms of step), tiny-parse forced collections 12 → 0, exit step_us 1765 → 1443 ms; at 400 chars 2 → 0.
It is not a CPU win and it costs RSS in the multi-turn regime at the default tenuring: 1-turn paired rows 3300 −0.4 / +3.7 / +1.5 / +1.1 / +1.5 % (median +1.5 %), 400 flat, peak equal; 4-turn: RSS after turns 1–4 main 643 / 616 / 621 / 620 MB vs this PR 627 / 861 / 859 / 854, peak 653 → 967 MB (+48 %), turn-2 CPU +0.55 s. Mechanism: with the adaptive policy collapsing to S=1 at the first minor (occupancy rule), every minor promotes eden blocks in place into old space and takes fresh nursery blocks; the ArenaBytes-armed majors that this PR removes were the only thing sweeping and returning that capacity between turns, so old occupancy stays at 51–55 MB while the arena grows a block-set per minor. With S=2 pinned on the same runtime the picture inverts: 0 budgeted cycles, peak 611–616, RSS 589–596 flat across four turns, promoted 12 MB in turns 2–4 — the best multi-turn profile measured on any arm.
Correctness finding: with the adaptive policy (S 4 → 1 at the first minor) cc hit a TypeError in turn 3 in 2 of 2 rounds (Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'inst') / (reading 'memoizedState'), same call chain, two different undefined reads: a live object lost), no panic, no runtime stderr; 2 of 3 such runs on this runtime, 0 of 2 with S=2 pinned, 0 of 1 on main. A discriminator (main with S=1 pinned; this runtime under PERRY_GC_VERIFY_EVACUATION / PERRY_GC_PROTECT_FROMSPACE) is queued. The promotion-reservation change in the second commit combined with promote-on-first-copy is the first suspect.
Reading: not landing as built. The trigger's unit is right, but it removed a job the majors were doing; the coherent design is this change together with a policy that never sits at S=1 on this workload (#9949) and a copying minor that right-sizes the arena after a flip instead of relying on a major — after the crash is explained.

• Crash discriminator (ATX, 8 runs): 0 of 8 reproduced (main unset 0/2, main pinned S=1 0/2, this runtime unset 0/2, under from-space protection 0/1; the evacuation verifier run died in its own panic). Cumulative on this runtime at the default tenuring: 2 of 7; on main 0 of 5 — intermittent and not attributable either way. The two crashed sessions' transcripts end after turn 2 (the turn-3 message never reached the transcript), so the fault fired in the prompt-submit path; the on-screen frames were mis-symbolised and are not a lead. The RSS growth is reproducible and explained (0 budgeted cycles vs 2–4; minors 22 vs 27; the arena keeps what the majors used to sweep). A tooling finding: PERRY_GC_VERIFY_EVACUATION=1 panics on this tree (gc/malloc.rs:527: RefCell already borrowed) — being fixed separately so the verifier can be used on GC branches.

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