JikesRVM: Internal Mechanisms Study and Garbage Collection with MMTk

TL;DR

This paper investigates the internal mechanisms of Jikes RVM, focusing on its JIT compilation and garbage collection, and introduces a new compressor mark-compact collector algorithm implemented within MMTk, along with a benchmarking tool.

Contribution

It provides an in-depth study of Jikes RVM's JIT and GC, implements a novel compressor mark-compact collector, and develops a benchmarking micro-benchmark for GC algorithms.

Findings

Implemented compressor mark-compact collector in MMTk

Developed XPDBench micro-benchmark for GC performance

Analyzed Jikes RVM's JIT and GC mechanisms

Abstract

High Level Language Virtual Machines is a core topic of interest for the researchers who are into virtual execution environments. As an open source virtual machine released to 16 universities, as early as 2001, Jikes RVM has been a major drive for many researches. While working on this project, we studied the JIT compilation of Jikes RVM as well as the Garbage Collection (GC) which is handled by the Memory Management Toolkit (MMTk), a part of the Jikes RVM. We also studied the Compressor Mark-Compact Collector algorithm and implemented it for MMTk. We have also implemented a micro-benchmark for the GC algorithms in Java, named "XPDBench", for benchmarking the implementations.