The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Jan. 10, 1989
Filed:
Jun. 26, 1986
Timothy J McEntee, Garland, TX (US);
Robert W Bloemer, Dallas, TX (US);
Donald W Oxley, Carrollton, TX (US);
Satish M Thatte, Richardson, TX (US);
Texas Instruments Incorporated, Dallas, TX (US);
Abstract
An incremental garbage collector for use in conjunction with a virtual memory, operates on selected generations of an area upon objects which are contained in a semispace, oldspace or newspace, and during the garbage collection process, all accessible objects are copied from the oldspace to the newspace. The garbage collection process occurs in four phases. In the 'flip' phase oldspace and newspace of each generation are exchanged. In the 'trace' phase, the pointers which are part of a root set of the generation being collected are traced and all oldspace objects referenced by the pointers are copied to newspace, and the pointers in the root set are updated. All copied objects are then 'scavenged' to update any pointers in the cells of the copied objects, and to copy to newspace all oldspace objects referenced by those pointers. Finally a 'cleaning oldspace' phase is performed as a low-priority background process to purge the entries for the virtual pages on which 'obsolete' pointers reside.