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:
Apr. 18, 2000
Filed:
Dec. 10, 1997
Lorenz Francis Huelsbergen, Hoboken, NJ (US);
Philip Steven Winterbottom, Gillette, NJ (US);
Lucent Technologies Inc., Murray Hill, NJ (US);
Abstract
A garbage collection technique for the concurrent operation of a mutator and garbage collector (e.g., marker and sweeper) without requiring fine-grain synchronization or atomicity amongst the mutator, marker and sweeper. The garbage collector employs three threads for concurrently executing the mutator, marker and sweeper, and operates through a series of so called epochs (i.e., individual garbage collection cycles) wherein each epoch (1) runs the mutator; (2) marks all objects that were reachable (i.e., allocated) in the previous epoch with the present epoch's color; and (3) reclaims any objects marked as garbage. Significantly, the object coloring scheme used in the garbage collector eliminates the need for fine-grain synchronization or atomicity by maintaining the invariant that the mutator never sees an object colored with the sweeper's color. Further, only the marker may alter an object's color during an epoch further eliminating the need for fine-grain synchronization or atomicity between the mutator, marker and sweeper.