status of gcj's boehm collector?

Tue Dec 4 16:29:00 GMT 2001

Adam Megacz wrote:
>>2) On a platform like Linux modified page information is kept by write
>>protecting pages and catching write faults. This works fine if the page is
>>modified as the result of an instruction executed by the user program. It
>>causes problems if the write occurs as the result of a system call. Thus
>>system calls must be suitably protected. There are some hooks in the GC
>>library to do this, but libgcj doesn't. Furthermore, those hooks currently
>>have problems in multithreaded environments with blocking system calls.
>>>>Okay, so this means that incremental GC isn't likely to happen.
>
I don't think its unfixable, and I would certainly like to see an 
incremental (or concurrent?) option in the future. But clearly the 
tradeoff is between overall throughput and reduced latency/pause times, 
so its only a win for interactive applications, which gcj doesn't really 
support. Yet.
>I think I can live with that. How about generational GC?
>
I think that with the boehm-gc, one implies the other.
regards
Bryce.