Patent ID: 8825718

Claim:
A method for garbage collection in an object-based memory system, the object-based memory system associated with a processing environment that executes at least one mutator program, each mutator program having at least one corresponding mutator thread, the method comprising: receiving, at a first garbage collection unit, root data from a processor associated with the first garbage collection unit; processing, at the first garbage collection unit, object references derived from the root data received from the processor associated with the first garbage collection unit including identifying read and write barrier information from a state bit associated with the at least one mutator thread and with at least one cache line, the state bit representing either a clean or a dirty state, wherein the state bit is set to the dirty state upon initiation of a garbage collection cycle for the at least one mutator thread; determining which object references derived from the root data are associated with a second garbage collection unit; upon determining that an object reference is associated with the second garbage collection unit, communicating information representative of the object reference to the second garbage collection unit associated with the object reference; and activating a read barrier in the processor, the read barrier operable to prevent incorrect read operations from a cache line to a mutator thread.