Modifying the JVM to have a more deterministic garbage collection model

mirza2m at gmail.com mirza2m at gmail.com
Fri Oct 31 19:29:54 UTC 2008


Hi,
For my class project I want to modify the JVM to have a more deterministic
garbage collection model. I will take a  reference counting approach to
accomplish this.  More specifically I will use a variation of  the algorithm
described here

http://www.jucs.org/jucs_13_6/cyclic_reference_counting_with/jucs_13_6_0830_0838_lins.pdf

In order to do this I need to store  reference count or multiple reference
counts for each object.  I will also need to update these counts when a
reference is added or removed. I need some help on figuring out what would
be the best way to do this? Can this be done by tweaking or replacing some
parts of the jvm or would I have to do an over haul of the whole jvm (I hope
that is not the case :) ) I have looked at some of the source code at
src/share/vm/{memory, gc-interface, gc-implementation} but seems like this
only handles garbage collection it self, I also wanted to know where I would
put hooks to update refrence counts and what would be the best place to
store the reference counts, with in the object itself or somewhere else. Any
suggestion on software engineering aspect of this project would also be very
helpful.


Thank you
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