GC question

[Andreas Huber]

Hi,

I don't know if this is the right place to ask but I'll try anyway...

Is it really necessary to scan the entire (active) stack of a thread or
would it be sufficient to scan the part of the stack that contains the
method locals? IOW, what would the gc find if it scanned the entire
stack? Does the VM itself rely on the memory it allocates being gc'd or
is it disciplined enough to free memory it no longer uses?

The reason I'm asking this is that I'm trying to figure out a way to
make the gc work with native threads that don't allow a thread to
inspect another thread's stack.

Andreas