Garbage collector refinement for new dynamic multimedia applications on embedded systems

Abstract

Consumer embedded devices must execute concurrently multiple services (e.g. multimedia applications) that are dynamically triggered by the user. For these new embedded multimedia applications, the dynamic memory subsystem is currently one of the main sources of power consumption and its inattentive management can severely affect the performance and power consumption and its attentive management can severely affect the performance and power consumption of the whole system. Therefore, the use of suitable automatic mechanisms to reuse the dynamic computer storage (i.e. garbage collector mechanisms) taking into account the underlying embedded devices would allow the designers to more efficiently design these systems. However, methodologies to explore and implement convenient garbage collector mechanisms for embedded devices have not been developed yet. In this paper we propose a system-level method to define and explore the vast design space of possible garbage collector mechanisms, which enables to define custom garbage collector implementations for the final embedded devices.