Conservative GC is pretty much: look at all reachable memory, whatever looks like a pointer to a range which is allocated keeps that range allocated.
Pros: you don't have to care about type information and precise stack/structure walking.
Cons: If you have range 0x8000-0x8010 allocated, and have a variable with integer value 0x8001 somewhere in the memory, it will keep that range allocated. It doesn't matter that it's an int, not a pointer. Floats and 32-bit pointers have quite a lot of accidental collisions that way.
Conservative GCs don't know which bytes in memory are actually pointers, so they treat every word in memory as being a pointer if it looks like one. This means if you have some other value that happens to look like a pointer — in this case a float — the GC will think it's pointing to some other memory and keep that memory around even though it isn't used.
Pros: you don't have to care about type information and precise stack/structure walking.
Cons: If you have range 0x8000-0x8010 allocated, and have a variable with integer value 0x8001 somewhere in the memory, it will keep that range allocated. It doesn't matter that it's an int, not a pointer. Floats and 32-bit pointers have quite a lot of accidental collisions that way.