Designing a concurrent hardware garbage collector for small embedded systems

Authors:
Flavius Gruian;Zoran Salcic
Affiliations:
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
Venue:
ACSAC'05 Proceedings of the 10th Asia-Pacific conference on Advances in Computer Systems Architecture
Year:
2005

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Abstract

Today more and more functionality is packed into all kinds of embedded systems, making high-level languages, such as Java, increasingly attractive as implementation languages. However, certain aspects, essential to high-level languages are much harder to address in a low performance, small embedded system than on a desktop computer. One of these aspects is memory management with garbage collection. This paper describes the design process behind a concurrent, garbage collector unit (GCU), a coprocessor to the Java Optimised Processor. The GCU, targeting small embedded real-time applications, implements a mark-compact algorithm, extended with concurrency support, and tuned for improved performance.