GemStone internals videos

I’m working on a few new posts, but in the meantime, you may be interested in some videos James Foster (one of the GemStone Smalltalk engineers) has posted on the GemStone VM. MagLev is based on the same VM, so much of what James has to say is applicable to MagLev.

Here are the videos so far:

• What is GemStone?
• Object Representation
• Special Objects and Object Headers
• Large Objects
• Repository, Extents, Pages and the Object Table
• GemStone/S Components
• Shared Page Cache
• New Object
• Reading Existing Objects
• Modifying and Dereferencing an Object (new)
• Commit Records (new)
• Avoiding a Commit Record Backlog (new)
• Commit Processing (new)
• Concurrency (new)
• Lock Granularity (new)
• Reduced Conflict Classes (new)
• The Stone Process (new)
• Live and Dead Objects (new)
• Nine Steps in Repository-Wide Garbage Collection (new)
• And more to come…