As reported in #2449, under certain circumstances it's possible to get
stuck in an infinite loop attempting to purge from the HPA. We now
handle this by validating the HPA settings at the end of
configuration parsing and either normalizing them or aborting depending on
if `abort_conf` is set.
This change allows every allocator conforming to PAI communicate that it
deferred some work for the future. Without it if a background thread goes into
indefinite sleep, there is no way to notify it about upcoming deferred work.