Collecting garbage from the Young space is called Minor GC. This definition is both clear and uniformly understood. But there are still some interesting takeaways you should be aware of when dealing with Minor Garbage Collection events:

1. Minor GC is always triggered when the JVM is unable to allocate space for a new object, e.g. Eden is getting full. So the higher the allocation rate, the more frequently Minor GC occurs.
2. During a Minor GC event, Tenured Generation is effectively ignored. References from Tenured Generation to Young Generation are considered to be GC roots. References from Young Generation to Tenured Generation are simply ignored during the mark phase.
3. Against common belief, Minor GC does trigger stop-the-world pauses, suspending the application threads. For most applications, the length of the pauses is negligible latency-wise if most of the objects in the Eden can be considered garbage and are never copied to Survivor/Old spaces. If the opposite is true and most of the newborn objects are not eligible for collection, Minor GC pauses start taking considerably more time.

So defining Minor GC is easy – Minor GC cleans the Young Generation.