JikesRVM: Internal Mechanisms Study and Garbage Collection with MMTk

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.