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Designing a Concurrent Hardware Garbage Collector for Small Embedded Systems

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Advances in Computer Systems Architecture (ACSAC 2005)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 3740))

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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.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand

    Flavius Gruian & Zoran Salcic

Authors
  1. Flavius Gruian
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  2. Zoran Salcic
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for High Performance Embedded Systems, School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 639798, Singapore

    Thambipillai Srikanthan

  2. National ICT, Australia

    Jingling Xue

  3. Centre for High Performance Embedded Systems, Nanyang Technological University, 639798, Singapore

    Chip-Hong Chang

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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Gruian, F., Salcic, Z. (2005). Designing a Concurrent Hardware Garbage Collector for Small Embedded Systems. In: Srikanthan, T., Xue, J., Chang, CH. (eds) Advances in Computer Systems Architecture. ACSAC 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3740. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11572961_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11572961_23

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-29643-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32108-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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