py/mpstate.h: Adjust start of root pointer section to exclude non-ptrs.

This patch moves the start of the root pointer section in mp_state_ctx_t
so that it skips entries that are not pointers and don't need scanning.

Previously, the start of the root pointer section was at the very beginning
of the mp_state_ctx_t struct (which is the beginning of mp_state_thread_t).
This was the original assembler version of the NLR code was hard-coded to
have the nlr_top pointer at the start of this state structure.  But now
that the NLR code is partially written in C there is no longer this
restriction on the location of nlr_top (and a comment to this effect has
been removed in this patch).

So now the root pointer section starts part way through the
mp_state_thread_t structure, after the entries which are not root pointers.

This patch also moves the non-pointer entries for MICROPY_ENABLE_SCHEDULER
outside the root pointer section.

Moving non-pointer entries out of the root pointer section helps to make
the GC more precise and should help to prevent some cases of collectable
garbage being kept.

This patch also has a measurable improvement in performance of the
pystone.py benchmark: on unix x86-64 and stm32 there was an improvement of
roughly 0.6% (tested with both gcc 7.3 and gcc 8.1).

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/py/gc.c b/py/gc.c
index 84c9918fd..38de51399 100644
--- a/py/gc.c
+++ b/py/gc.c
@@ -328,7 +328,9 @@ void gc_collect_start(void) {
     // correctly in the mp_state_ctx structure.  We scan nlr_top, dict_locals,
     // dict_globals, then the root pointer section of mp_state_vm.
     void **ptrs = (void**)(void*)&mp_state_ctx;
-    gc_collect_root(ptrs, offsetof(mp_state_ctx_t, vm.qstr_last_chunk) / sizeof(void*));
+    size_t root_start = offsetof(mp_state_ctx_t, thread.dict_locals);
+    size_t root_end = offsetof(mp_state_ctx_t, vm.qstr_last_chunk);
+    gc_collect_root(ptrs + root_start / sizeof(void*), (root_end - root_start) / sizeof(void*));
 
     #if MICROPY_ENABLE_PYSTACK
     // Trace root pointers from the Python stack.