Being meta-circular, Jikes RVM requires a bootstrapping JVM to run upon to create a boot image.

The Memory Management Toolkit (MMTk) is a set of precise garbage collectors that have been used within Jikes RVM and other projects such as the Singularity operating system and the Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure (SSCLI, formerly named Rotor).

[4] As with the rest of the Jikes RVM, the implementation is in Java, but the main dependence is on VM Magic.

Jikes RVM uses a fast baseline compiler to quickly generate code for a given architecture.

Jikes RVM supports PowerPC (or ppc) and IA-32 (or Intel x86, 32-bit) instruction set processor architectures.