Hardware-based solution detecting illegal references in real-time Java

Abstract

The memory model used in the Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ) imposes strict assignment rules to or from memory areas preventing the creation of dangling pointers, and thus maintaining the pointer safety of Java. An implementation solution to ensure the checking of these rules before each assignment statement consists to use write barriers executing a stack-based algorithm. This paper provides a hardware-based solution for both write barriers and the stack-based algorithm.