Hi Varun,
Sorry for the delay in responding to you, and thanks for your interest in the Eclipse OMR project!
A little bit more information, about the GSoC Idea: We use a custom allocator for our Garbage Collector. The Valgrind memcheck[1] tool is not able to understand when an object becomes accessible and when the object has been freed. This project is to teach memcheck if a region of memory is accessible. OMR has several GC policies, some of which will require more work than others to work with memcheck. We will want to start with the most basic policy, a mark and sweep collector, and potentially target further technology later. We will be using the "Valgrind Client API".[2] You can find more information about how this can be used in section 4.8 of the manual [3].
The first step would be to:
1. Run the example GC under valgrind using memcheck
To start understanding where to look in the GC code base for "hook up" points to memcheck, you will want to look at when the heap expands, when objects are initialized from the TLH, and when objects are swept.
For further contact, we recommend joining the IBM Developer Works Open slack group.
2. Join the #omr channel
The next steps regarding GSoC would be to start working on a proposal for the project; no work on the project actually needs to be completed. The deadline to submit a proposal is April 3 16:00 UTC. It would be best if you posted your proposal to the mailing list or slack for feedback before officially submitting.
Best regards,
Charlie Gracie, Andrew Young and Robert Young