[gclist] Multi-processor garbage collection

[Simon Spero]

Hi- 
  This is probably a stupid question, but at least it'll make a change 
from finalisation :-)

I recently got a BeBox (dual PowerPC, no easy access to the VM primitives
yet ), and as a learning exercise I'm trying to bring up a partial
implementation of the java VM. Does anybody have any
suggestions/war-stories about building collectors for shared-memory
multi-processors where the number of processors is relatively small (say,
2-8)? I'd like to come up with something that can run in squishy-time
(very soft real-time). 

The current design I'm tending towards is a mark/sweep concurrent
collector using card-marking dirty-bits with an entire byte used to 
store the dirty flag, and with allocation coming off of   segregated 
free-lists, possibly on a per-thread basis. Is this doomed to failure? 

Simon

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