Re: Sharing GC resources between applications

Robin,
   While I am not Dr. Berger, I can answer these questions, also.

> 1. Will you make your bookmarking collector software available?

Currently, we are implementing additional improvements and re-running 
experiments for the PLDI camera-ready copy deadline. Once this is 
complete, our plan is to donate the garbage collection and runtime 
system code to the Jikes RVM and, hopefully, make it available via their 
CVS tree.  We will also make the Linux patch available via a web page, 
while working on incorporating into the Linux source.

> 2. Would it be hard to port the bookmarking collector to C so that it
> can be used with .NET and other VM based platforms as well?

As part of the Jikes RVM, BC is written in Java and should be relative 
straightforward to rewrite in C.

Cooperation with the OS is one of the keys to the bookmarking 
collector's good paging performance.  While we created a communication 
path in Linux (allowing a full implementation of BC in Mono), I am not 
sure how easy it would be to enable this communication for .NET.

> 3. Is the bookmarking collector approach still viable if I want to run
> 10s or 100s of virtual machines simultaneously? 

I have not tried running that many simultaneous VMs yet.  While I cannot 
guarantee anything, nothing in my experiments suggest that BC will have 
any problems in that environment.

Please let me know if you have any additional questions.

Matthew Hertz
[email protected]
http://www.cs.umass.edu/~hertz