NHDaly / mmtk-julia

Julia binding for MMTk

An MMTk binding for the Julia programming language.

Checking out and Building Julia with MMTk

Besides checking out the binding, it is also necessary to checkout a fork containing a modified version of the Julia repository onto a subfolder of the biding (eg. vm/julia). The correct version can be found at https://github.com/mmtk/julia/tree/master. For step-by-step instructions, read the section "Quick Building Guide".

The directory structure should look like the diagram below:

Your working directory/
├─ mmtk-julia/
│  ├─ julia/
│  ├─ mmtk/
│  └─ vm/julia # should be cloned manually
└─ mmtk-core/ (optional)

To build Julia with MMTk, create a Make.user file in the top-level directory of the Julia repository (vm/julia/) and add an entry USE_MMTK=1. Finally, set the following environment variables:

export MMTK_BUILD=release # or debug depending on how you build the Rust binding
export MMTK_JULIA_DIR=<path-to-mmtk-julia>

Before building Julia, build the Rust binding in mmtk-julia/mmtk. Note that we currently support either immix or marksweep implementations in mmtk-core (build it with cargo build --features immix # or marksweep). To build Julia, navigate to /vm/julia and run make (or make debug). Please also make sure to install any dependency considering any particular requirement from both Julia and MMTk.

Heap Size

Currently MMTk supports a fixed heap limit or variable heap within an interval. The default is a variable heap with the minimum heap size set to Julia's default_collection_interval and the maximum size set to 70% of the free memory available. To change these values set the environment variables MMTK_MIN_HSIZE and MMTK_MAX_HSIZE to set the mininum and maximum size in megabytes, or MMTK_MIN_HSIZE_G and MMTK_MAX_HSIZE_G to set the size in gigabytes. If both environment variables are set, MMTk will use the size in megabytes. To set a fixed heap size, simply set only the variables MMTK_MAX_HSIZE or MMTK_MAX_HSIZE_G, or set MMTK_MIN_HSIZE or MMTK_MIN_HSIZE_G to 0. Note that these values can be decimal numbers, e.g. MMTK_MAX_HSIZE_G=1.5.

Quick Building Guide

(1) Clone this repo: https://github.com/mmtk/mmtk-julia (run git clone https://github.com/mmtk/mmtk-julia -b v1.8.2-RAI)

(2) Enter the mmtk-julia directory and clone https://github.com/mmtk/julia/tree/v1.8.2-RAI (run git clone https://github.com/mmtk/julia.git vm/julia -b v1.8.2-RAI)

(3) inside mmtk-julia/mmtk run cargo build --features immix # --release (optional - needs to match the MMTK_BUILD variable) (run cargo build --features marksweep to use marksweep instead) and inside mmtk-julia/vm/julia run make # debug (optional), making sure you have the environment variables above set up and a file in mmtk-julia/vm/julia named "Make.user" containing USE_MMTK=1.

Further information

More about MMTk: https://github.com/mmtk/mmtk-core

More about Julia: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia