Hardware-Supported Pointer Detection for Common Garbage Collections

Many mobile systems have to achieve both high performance and low memory usage, and the total performance of the wide range of platforms now can be affected by the effectiveness of Garbage Collection (GC). GC algorithms have been actively studied and improved, but they still have not reached any fundamental solution. In this paper, we focus on the point that the objects on the call stack should be traced in many GC algorithms, and propose a hardware support technique for speed up of this trace. To trace objects, it is needed to find pointers on the call stack. Hence, we install tables for managing all pointers on the call stack. By referring these tables, the GC routine can detect pointers immediately. The result of the simulation experiment shows the proposed method leads to low GC latency.