Using Transactional Memory to Synchronize an Adaptive Garbage Collector in Real-Time Java

Abstract

Currently multicore systems start to be used even in low-end devices such as embedded systems controllers requiring real-time guarantees. Hardware Transactional Memory (TM) is a new synchronization paradigm for this architecture, allowing problems of lock-based methods and making easer programming. We propose to use TM to synchronize the concurrent/parallel execution of the Garbage Collector (GC) and Java applications, within the context of an embedded real-time environment. GC gives robust programming, and performance advantages. Since in the context of real-time systems, a collector must guarantee a worst-case in it performance, the worst-case time for a committed transaction must be limited; we achieve this by limiting its size (i.e., the size of the explored object).