Atomic Incremental Garbage Collection and Recovery for a Large Stable Heap
Abstract
A stable heap is storage that is managed automatically using garbage collection, manipulated using atomic transactions, and accessed using a uniform storage model. These features enhance reliability and simplify programming by preventing errors due to explicit deallocation, by masking failures and concurrency using transactions, and by eliminating the distinction between accessing temporary storage and permanent storage. Stable heap management is useful for programming languages for reliable distributed computing, programming languages with persistent storage, and object-oriented database systems. Many applications that could benefit from a stable heap (e.g., computer-aided design, computer-aided software engineering, and office information systems) require large amounts of storage, timely responses for transactions, and high availability. We present garbage collection and recovery algorithms for a stable heap implementation that meet these goals and are appropriate for stock hardware. The collector is incremental: it does not attempt to collect the whole heap at once. The collector is also atomic: it is coordinated with the recovery system to prevent problems when it moves and modifies objects. The time for recovery is independent of heap size, and can be shortened using checkpoints.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Feb 01, 1992
- Accession Number
- ADA256800
Entities
People
- Elliot K. Kolodner
Organizations
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology