A different kind of Walter? :-)

[Sean Kelly]

Frits van Bommel wrote:
> Alexander Panek wrote:
>> On Thu, 19 Apr 2007 01:07:22 -0700
>> Walter Bright <newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote:
>>
>>> David B. Held wrote:
>>>> That being said, I think it would be *particularly* clever of you
>>>> to use your start-from-scratch kernel to explore new ideas in
>>>> multi-processing and massive multithreading, but this would imply
>>>> having decent multi-CPU hardware to play with.
>>> I'd also like to see better operating system support for garbage 
>>> collection - either making gc an operating system service, or
>>> providing hooks to the virtual memory subsystem so the gc can tell
>>> when pages are dirty.
>>
>> Well, something along the lines of that is what I was thinking of. I'm
>> not so sure how to make the GC an operating system service, though..?
> 
> http://www-cs.canisius.edu/~hertzm/bc.html has a nice idea on support 
> the OS could give to garbage collection: they modified Linux to notify 
> the process when it was about to get some of its memory swapped out. 
> Then the process could perform a quick GC (focusing on freeing up pages 
> of memory) and tell the OS which pages to unmap or swap out. The GC 
> freeing pages means the GC can tell the OS memory manager that certain 
> pages can be thrown out without saving them to disk first (no disk 
> writes is faster than disk writes :) ).

I can think of at least two papers on this topic for anyone interested. 
  One is "Reducing Garbage Collector Cache Missed" by Hans Boehm, and 
the other is "Garbage Collection Without Paging" by Hertz, Feng, and 
Berger.  Both should be available with a bit of googling.


Sean