Garbage collection in an uncooperative environment

Boehm, Hans-J.; Weiser, Mark

doi:10.1002/spe.4380180902

Cited by 461 publications

(243 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…The most widelyused dynamic approach to handling memory leaks is garbage collection [35,36,37,38], which adds runtime overhead to the program. There is also research on dynamic memoryleak detection [39,40,41,42,43,44,45], which provides the location of an allocation which will be leaked later.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Safe Memory-Leak Fixing for C Programs

Gao

Xiong

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE/ACM 37th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering

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Abstract-Automatic bug fixing has become a promising direction for reducing manual effort in debugging. However, general approaches to automatic bug fixing may face some fundamental difficulties. In this paper, we argue that automatic fixing of specific types of bugs can be a useful complement.This paper reports our first attempt towards automatically fixing memory leaks in C programs. Our approach generates only safe fixes, which are guaranteed not to interrupt normal execution of the program. To design such an approach, we have to deal with several challenging problems such as inter-procedural leaks, global variables, loops, and leaks from multiple allocations. We propose solutions to all the problems and integrate the solutions into a coherent approach.We implemented our inter-procedural memory leak fixing into a tool named LeakF ix and evaluated LeakF ix on 15 programs with 522k lines of code. Our evaluation shows that LeakF ix is able to successfully fix a substantial number of memory leaks, and LeakF ix is scalable for large applications.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Safe Memory-Leak Fixing for C Programs

Gao

Xiong

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE/ACM 37th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering

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“…Boehm presents a practical implementation of a conservative garbage collector for C using conservative root scanning [9] and describes methods that reduce the likelihood for pointer misidentification during conservative root scanning [10]. Heap addresses that are found to be referenced by misidentified pointers are blacklisted, the referenced memory is not used for allocation such that future references to these addresses found during conservative root scanning will not cause the retention of memory.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Constant-Time Root Scanning for Deterministic Garbage Collection

Siebert

2001

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. Root scanning is the task of identifying references to heap objects that are stored outside of the heap itself, in global and local variables and on the execution stack. Root scanning is particularly difficult within an incremental garbage collector that needs to be deterministic or give hard realtime guarantees. Here, a method that allows exact root scanning is presented. The basic idea is to ensure that copies of all root references exist on the heap whenever the garbage collector might become active. This approach reduces the root scanning phase of the garbage collection cycle to an efficient constant-time operation. A Java virtual machine and a static Java bytecode compiler that use this technique have been implemented and analysed using the SPECjvm98 benchmark suite. This Java implementation allows for deterministic memory management as needed in real-time systems that is difficult to achieve with traditional methods to perform root scanning.

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“…In order to be precise in the absence of hardware support, object scanning requires assistance from the language runtime. Otherwise, tracing must conservatively assume all fields are references [6,7,14]. This paper quantitatively explores the design tradeoffs for object scanning in precise garbage collectors.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A comprehensive evaluation of object scanning techniques

Garner

Blackburn

Frampton

2011

Proceedings of the International Symposium on Memory Management

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At the heart of all garbage collectors lies the process of identifying and processing reference fields within an object. Despite its key role, and evidence of many different implementation approaches, to our knowledge no comprehensive quantitative study of this design space exists. The lack of such a study means that implementers must rely on 'conventional wisdom', hearsay, and their own costly analysis. Starting with mechanisms described in the literature and a variety of permutations of these, we explore the impact of a number of dimensions including: a) the choice of data structure, b) levels of indirection from object to metadata, and c) specialization of scanning code. We perform a comprehensive examination of these tradeoffs on four different architectures using eighteen benchmarks and hardware performance counters. We inform the choice of mechanism with a detailed study of heap composition and object structure as seen by the garbage collector on these benchmarks. Our results show that choice of scanning mechanism is important. We find that a careful choice of scanning mechanism alone can improve garbage collection performance by 16% and total time by 2.5%, on average, over a well tuned baseline. We observe substantial variation in performance among architectures, and find that some mechanisms-particularly specialization, layout of reference fields in objects, and encoding metadata in object headers-yield consistent, significant advantages.

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Garbage collection in an uncooperative environment

Cited by 461 publications

References 17 publications

Safe Memory-Leak Fixing for C Programs

Safe Memory-Leak Fixing for C Programs

Constant-Time Root Scanning for Deterministic Garbage Collection

A comprehensive evaluation of object scanning techniques

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