Precise Garbage Collection for C Jon Rafkind Adam Wick John Regehr Matthew Flatt University of Utah Galois, Inc. University of Utah University of Utah
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[email protected] Abstract no-ops. The resulting program usually runs about as well as before, Magpie is a source-to-source transformation for C programs that but without the ongoing maintenance burden of manual memory enables precise garbage collection, where precise means that inte- management. In our experience, however, conservative GC works gers are not confused with pointers, and the liveness of a pointer poorly for long-running programs, such as a web server, a program- is apparent at the source level. Precise GC is primarily useful for ming environment, or an operating system kernel. For such pro- long-running programs and programs that interact with untrusted grams, conservative GC can trigger unbounded memory use due to components. In particular, we have successfully deployed precise linked lists [Boehm 2002] that manage threads and continuations; GC in the C implementation of a language run-time system that was this problem is usually due to liveness imprecision [Hirzel et al. originally designed to use conservative GC. We also report on our 2002], rather than type imprecision. Furthermore, the programs experience in transforming parts of the Linux kernel to use precise are susceptible to memory-exhaustion attack from malicious code GC instead of manual memory management. (e.g., user programs or untrusted servlets) that might be otherwise restricted through a sandbox [Wick and Flatt 2004]. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.4.2 [Storage Manage- This paper describes our design of and experience with a GC ment]: Garbage Collection for C that is less conservative.