Execution of system tasks in context of another process

A process requesting a system task to be executed in the context of
another process will be notified by a message when the task has
executed. This message will be on the form:
  {RequestType, RequestId, Pid, Result}.

A process requesting a system task to be executed can set priority
on the system task. The requester typically set the same priority
on the task as its own process priority, and by this avoiding
priority inversion. A request for execution of a system task is
made by calling the statically linked in NIF
erts_internal:request_system_task(Pid, Prio, Request). This is an
undocumented ERTS internal function that should remain so. It
should *only* be called from BIF implementations.

Currently defined system tasks are:
* garbage_collect
* check_process_code

Further system tasks can and will be implemented in the future.

The erlang:garbage_collect/[1,2] and erlang:check_process_code/[2,3]
BIFs are now implemented using system tasks. Both the
'garbage_collect' and the 'check_process_code' operations perform
or may perform garbage_collections. By doing these via the
system task functionality all garbage collect operations in the
system will be performed solely in the context of the process
being garbage collected. This makes it possible to later implement
functionality for disabling garbage collection of a process over
context switches.

Newly introduced BIFs:

* erlang:garbage_collect/2 - The new second argument is an option
  list. Introduced option:
  * {async, RequestId} - making it possible for users to issue
    asynchronous garbage collect requests.

* erlang:check_process_code/3 -  The new third argument is an
  option list. Introduced options:
  * {async, RequestId} - making it possible for users to issue
    asynchronous check process code requests.
  * {allow_gc, boolean()} - making it possible to issue requests
    that aren't allowed to garbage collect (operation will abort
    if gc should be needed).
  These options have been introduced as a preparation for
  parallelization of check_process_code operations when the
  code_server is about to purge a module.

1 files changed, 4 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/erts/emulator/beam/global.h b/erts/emulator/beam/global.h
index bacd5a5752..885f092aca 100755
--- a/erts/emulator/beam/global.h
+++ b/erts/emulator/beam/global.h
@@ -655,6 +655,10 @@ Eterm erl_send(Process *p, Eterm to, Eterm msg);
 
 Eterm erl_is_function(Process* p, Eterm arg1, Eterm arg2);
 
+/* beam_bif_load.c */
+Eterm erts_check_process_code(Process *c_p, Eterm module, int allow_gc, int *redsp);
+
+
 /* beam_load.c */
 typedef struct {
     BeamInstr* current;		/* Pointer to: Mod, Name, Arity */