The diploma thesis focuses on an at its time unexplored topic: To do garbage collection on a
multi-threaded
microprocessor in real-time.
In a nutshell: The challenge is to garbage-collect in cooperation with other hardware-threads without disturbing
(synchronization!) them in a fine-grain scheduling environment.
Out of that the garbage-collection must be fast enough so the system
doesn't run out of free memory. This would stop the real-time threads - a desaster.
The target architecture for the studies and the implementation was the
Komodo microcontroller
which was developed at the
Institut für Prozeßrechentechnik (Prof. Dr. Uwe Brinkschulte) and
Institut für Rechnerentwurf und Fehlertoleranz (Prof. Dr. Theo Ungerer, now Uni Augsburg)
of the Universität Karlsruhe.
The scheduling of the controller allows a context switch within one CPU cycle. The register banks
of the hardware threads are located directly on the chip.
No big register banks must be copied to and from the slow main memory.
Here you can download the diploma thesis in German. There are the following files:
Out of that there is an English paper published on The Fourth IEEE International Symposium on Object-Oriented Real-Time Distributed Computing (ISORC):