Garbage Collection Roots

The "roots" are the set of pointers that the GC starts traversing from, i.e. the roots of the live object graph.

Most roots belong to a particular Capability. Traversing the roots of a capbility is done by markSomeCapabilities() in rts/Capability.c. The roots of a Capability are:

• The run queue (head and tail)
• The wakeup queue (head and tail)
• For each Task on the suspended_ccalling_tasks list, the TSO for that Task
• The Spark Pool
• Only for the non-threaded RTS: The blocked queue (head and tail), and the sleeping queue

In addition, each Capability has a remembered set for each generation. A remembered set is a source of roots if that generation is not being collected during this cycle; otherwise the remembered set is discarded. During GC, all remembered sets are discarded and new ones will be constructed for each generation and Capability; see scavenge_capability_mut_lists() in rts/sm/Scav.c.

There are also roots from other parts of the system:

• Signal handlers (only in the non-threaded RTS; in the threaded RTS signal handlers are maintained by the IO manager in GHC.Conc rather than the RTS).
• Weak pointers?
• Stable pointers?