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by nickpsecurity 3948 days ago
It's a tall order because you set it up to be. Real system design would call for a balancing act, as usual. Remember that you can put a bunch of GC's on one FPGA that all run concurrently with access to shitloads of I/O and/or fast memory bus. Amdahl's law shouldn't kick in any more than with concurrent GC's in general. The parallelism, simplicity, and tech like in your link should make it faster than an on-board collector. The concept isn't speculation as it's already been done in two different ways:

Fine-Grained Parallel Compacting Garbage Collection through Hardware-Supported Synchronization (2010) http://www.ikr.uni-stuttgart.de/Content/Publications/Archive...

Stall-free, real-time collector for FPGA's (2012) http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/files/us-bacon/B...

The question is, "Can modern CPU's and off-chip FPGA's keep in sync without performance getting dragged down?" The FPGA's have gotten faster. The CPU's I/O have gotten faster. So, I'm sure it can be done but it might be difficult enough to be someone's Master thesis. ;)

Besides, I call for replacing current chips with open ones easy to modify for acceleration and security. Gaisler LEON4 SPARC, Rocket RISC-V, Cambrige's BERI/CHERI MIPS64... these all come to mind. Plan was to put them onto a high-end FPGA w/ concurrent GC's to test the scheme. Once it worked, ASIC conversion time baby. S-ASIC's are $200-500k on average with resulting production & packaging being way cheaper after that. Just hoping there's a few companies that would split the cost to eliminate most memory and control flow issues forever. ;)