A Fast Parallel Conservative Garbage Collector for Concurrent 0 b ject- Orient ed Systems - Extended Abstract -
Satoshi Matsuoka, Akinori Yonezawa · 1991
In future 00-OS, multiple applications written in heterogeneous languages will interact via shared objects. There, conservative GC (garbage collection) could provide storage management independent of programming languages and applications. Conservative GC, however, is difficult to extend naively into a concurrent scheme that meet the demands of very fast allocation - up to one million objects per second. Our parallel conservative GC resolves this by allowing allocation and collection to be done almost totally in parallel. We currently estimate that allocation takes less than 20 instructions, including the overhead of (rare) synchronization. The preliminary version of the algorit.hm is running on a 4-processor LUNA-88K with Mach 2.5. Our algorithm relies on the virtual memory primitives to be available to the user in order to maintain the necessary invariants; we briefly discuss the requiremenh of the future 00-0s in this respect.