What is the "VM Periodic Task Thread"?

I can see this thread in my thread dump:

"VM Periodic Task Thread" prio=10 tid=0x00007fc23000e800 nid=开发者_开发知识库0x49e6 waiting on condition

What is it?

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Having a look at the latest OpenJDK source, this is C++ level thread which performs a number of tasks on systems where there is not a native timer interrupt.

It appears to be mostly used for sampling/profiling what the JVM is doing.