I just discovered this very interesting post by Zahid Qureshi. He tells us about a JVM flag, that I never heard about before, that displays all the JVM flags, their default value, and the values that were set by your own settings. With the following line, you get a list of over 700 flags in the JDK6:
java -XX:+UnlockDiagnosticVMOptions -XX:+PrintFlagsFinal -version
The "-version" flag is just here to avoid an error message. The "UnlockDiagnosticVMOptions" unlocks several JVM options. In the comments, you discover another flag that unlocks even more options: "-XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions".
I tried it with the JDK7, to confirm that G1 GC is not triggered by default:
bool UseG1GC = false