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Atomic incremental garbage collection

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Memory Management (IWMM 1992)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 637))

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Abstract

A stable heap is storage that is managed automatically using garbage collection, manipulated using atomic transactions, and accessed using a uniform storage model. These features enhance reliability and simplify programming by preventing errors due to explicit deallocation, by masking failures and concurrency using transactions, and by eliminating the distinction between accessing temporary storage and permanent storage. Stable heap management is useful for programming languages for reliable distributed computing, programming languages with persistent storage, and objectoriented database systems.

Many applications that could benefit from a stable heap (e.g., computeraided design, computer-aided software engineering, and office information systems) require large amounts of storage, timely responses for transactions, and high availability. We present garbage collection and recovery algorithms for a stable heap implementation that meet these goals and are appropriate for stock hardware. The collector is incremental: it does not attempt to collect the whole heap at once. The collector is also atomic: it is coordinated with the recovery system to prevent problems when it moves and modifies objects. The time for recovery is independent of heap size, even if a failure occurs during garbage collection.

This paper reports on research done by the authors at the Laboratory for Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant CCR-8716884, by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under Contract N00014-89-J-1988, and by an equipment grant from Digital Equipment Corporation.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. IBM Science and Technology, 32000, Technion City, Haifa, Israel

    Elliot K. Kolodner

  2. MIT Lab. for Computer Science, 545 Technology Square, 02139, Cambridge, MA, USA

    William E. Weihl

Authors
  1. Elliot K. Kolodner
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  2. William E. Weihl
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Yves Bekkers Jacques Cohen

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© 1992 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Kolodner, E.K., Weihl, W.E. (1992). Atomic incremental garbage collection. In: Bekkers, Y., Cohen, J. (eds) Memory Management. IWMM 1992. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 637. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0017202

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0017202

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-55940-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-47315-2

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