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:
May. 21, 2002
Filed:
Jun. 21, 1999
Richard J. Houldsworth, Horley, GB;
Steven Morris, Crawley, GB;
U.S. Philips Corporation, New York, NY (US);
Abstract
A data processing method and apparatus are described for mark-sweep garbage collection through stored data structures defined by data objects in a multi threading environment supporting the handling of finalizers. The sweeping stage consists of a linear sweep across the heap in which any objects with a mark-state of Deletable are deleted, while objects with finalizers and mark-state of pending are placed on a finalizers queue and marked. The number of objects with finalizers is tracked and compared with the known total allocated to the heap. If not all finalizable objects are found, a further marking operation is required to identify all objects reachable by finalizers. However, if all finalizable objects are found by the first marking operation, as indicated by a match between the found and stored totals, the marked unreachable objects may all be deleted in a single pass.