Garbage Collection in Real Time Systems

Abstract

Automated memory management techniques on garbage collection, reduces the complexity and problems of manual memory management. When used properly, it will lower development costs and save time by eliminating the need to test the product for faulty memory managed code. With the size and complexity in today’s systems, this is becoming increasingly crucial. Even though this thesis addresses the garbage collection in general, it is specially biased towards the real time garbage collection and an implementation. In this thesis the fundamentals of the three garbage collection techniques are surveyed. The fact that most, if not all, of the specific implementations that have been made are only suitable for interactive and soft real time systems makes this tasks server. Although, when these basic techniques are made incremental they become eligible for hard real time systems in the theory. An implementation in java has been made that at least the hard real time requirements of predictability and schedulability. When the suggested changes and the modifications to the compiler is implemented, the implementation should be quiet efficient.