Garbage Collecting an Object-Oriented Operating System Kernel

As part of the Renaissance project at Purdue University, we are investigating the feasibility of garbage collecting an actively running operating system kernel. In this paper, we discuss the algorithm we have adapted to our needs, along with the techniques we use to support garbage collection of C++ (the object-oriented language in which we have coded our system). 1 Introduction As part of the Renaissance project at Purdue University, we are investigating the feasibility of garbage collecting an actively running operating system kernel. We stress that we are collecting the system kernel itself, and not applications performing system services on top of a microkernel. Page tables, network buffers, files and process control blocks are all allocated out of the garbage collected heap. Collections run in parallel with the execution of application processes and interrupt processing. The kernel of the Renaissance system is constructed using object-oriented design techniques and is implemented..