[mercury-users] Parallelizing the garbage collector?

[Ondrej Bojar]

Hi.

I'm still hoping to use threads in my computations, but as I posted
recently and Peter Ross suggested, Boehm garbage collector wastes far
more time than the parallel processing can bring. After reading some of
the documentation, I believe that the gc needs to stop all the threads
too often to perform collection.

Boehm gc supports some extra flags to improve performance:
-DPARALLEL_MARK for parallel marking and -DTHREAD_LOCAL_ALLOC for
separate collectors for individual threads. (Parallel mark should help 
straight away, thread local needs to be actually used in mmc.)

I tried to add these options to rotd/configure into
CFLAGS_FOR_THREADS for my platform (linux, x64), but mmc compiled with
these extra flags fails to link my programs:

/home/bojar/opt/mercury-compiler-rotd-2006-03-18-x64-gcthread/lib/mercury/lib/libpar_gc.a(alloc.o)(.text+0x5a5): 

In function `GC_set_fl_marks':
: undefined reference to `GC_compare_and_exchange'
/home/bojar/opt/mercury-compiler-rotd-2006-03-18-x64-gcthread/lib/mercury/lib/libpar_gc.a(mark.o)(.text+0xeb): 

In function `GC_set_mark_bit':
: undefined reference to `GC_compare_and_exchange'
...

As far as I understand, boehm_gc/configure (which would support option 
--enable-parallel-mark) is not called from generic configure, so I 
cannot check if it would work better.

Would you recommend any workaround?

Or any chances for par.agc grade? (I have not read about accurate gc, 
but I expect it does not need to stop the world to reclaim unused blocks.)

Thanks, Ondrej.

-- 
Ondrej Bojar (mailto:obo at cuni.cz)
http://www.cuni.cz/~obo


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