Github user andrewor14 commented on a diff in the pull request: https://github.com/apache/spark/pull/1165#discussion_r15091634 --- Diff: core/src/main/scala/org/apache/spark/storage/MemoryStore.scala --- @@ -141,6 +174,86 @@ private class MemoryStore(blockManager: BlockManager, maxMemory: Long) } /** + * Unfold the given block in memory safely. + * + * The safety of this operation refers to avoiding potential OOM exceptions caused by + * unfolding the entirety of the block in memory at once. This is achieved by periodically + * checking whether the memory restrictions for unfolding blocks are still satisfied, + * stopping immediately if not. This check is a safeguard against the scenario in which + * there is not enough free memory to accommodate the entirety of a single block. + * + * This method returns either a fully unfolded array or a partially unfolded iterator. + */ + def unfoldSafely( --- End diff -- I looked at this more closely and realized we can't do this easily. With a type parameter, this returns an `Array[T]`. However, to put the result into block manager, we need an `Array[Any]`, and we cannot easily cast from one to another efficiently because arrays are not covariant. Unfortunately, I think we need to keep this one as `Any`.
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