On 12/10/2010 04:43 AM, Darren New wrote:
> http://www.cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/f034-hertz.pdf

"The bookmarking collector relies on some additional
operating system support, which consists of a modest extension
to the Linux virtual memory manager (approximately six hundred
lines of code)."

I love the way that 600 LoC is considered "modest". I wonder how ****ing 
big the whole VMM is?! o_O

Still, it's an interesting paper none the less. Existing OS design seems 
to assume that you will be using manual memory management, and therefore 
you will only request as much memory as you need. That means that if you 
run out of physical memory, it must be because your application really 
does actually need that much memory.

With the rise of GC, these assumptions are no longer the case. If 
program A requests more memory, it may well be that program B could do a 
GC sweep and release a chunk of memory. But the OS doesn't even ask 
(under the outdated assumption that the answer will always be "no").

I doubt we'll be seeing sophisticated cooperation schemes any time soon, 
but I wonder how long it will be before the OS gains the ability to 
notify an application that it should release some memory is possible?

Post a reply to this message