BB-GC: basic-block level garbage collection

Abstract

Memory space limitation is a serious problem for many embedded systems from diverse application domains. While circuit/packaging techniques are definitely important to squeeze large quantities of data/instruction into small size memories typically employed by embedded systems, software can also play a crucial role in reducing memory space demands of embedded applications. This paper focuses on a software-managed two-level memory hierarchy and instruction accesses. Our goal is to reduce on-chip memory requirements of a given application as much as possible, so that the memory space saved can be used by other simultaneously-executing applications. The proposed approach achieves this by tracking the lifetime of instructions. Specifically, when an instruction is dead (i.e. it could not be visited again in the rest of execution), we deallocate the on-chip memory space allocated to it. Working on the control flow graph representation of an embedded application, our approach performs basic block-level garbage collection for on-chip memories.