Are Java DirectByteBuffer wrappers garbage collect

I understand that when a directbytebuffer is allocated, its not subject to garbage collection, but what I'm wondering is if the wrapping object is garbage collected.

For example, if I allocated a new DirectByteBuffer dbb, and then duplicated(shallow copied) it using dbb.duplicate(), I'd have two wrappers around the same chunk of memory.

Are those wrappers subject to garbage collection? If I did

while(true){ DirectByteBuffer dbb2 = dbb.duplicate(); } 

Would I eventually OOM myself?

A:

In the Sun JDK, a java.nio.DirectByteBuffer—created by ByteBuffer#allocateDirect(int)—has a field of type sun.misc.Cleaner, which extends java.lang.ref.PhantomReference.

When this Cleaner (remember, a subtype of PhantomReference) gets collected and is about to move into the associated ReferenceQueue, the collection-related thread running through the nested type ReferenceHandler has a special case treatment of Cleaner instances: it downcasts and calls on Cleaner#clean(), which eventually makes its way back to calling on DirectByteBuffer$Deallocator#run(), which in turn calls on Unsafe#freeMemory(long). Wow.

It's rather circuitous, and I was surprised to not see any use of Object#finalize() in play. The Sun developers must have had their reasons for tying this in even closer to the collection and reference management subsystem.

In short, you won't run out of memory by virtue of abandoning references to DirectByteBufferinstances, so long as the garbage collector has a chance to notice the abandonment and its reference handling thread makes progress through the calls described above.