[LLVMdev] [VMKit] OpenJDK Port

[Will Dietz]

On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 1:45 PM, Nicolas Geoffray
<nicolas.geoffray at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Supporting OpenJDK is very interesting indeed, as full 1.6 support is
>> important to us.  How intense of a project would undertaking this be?
>> And is this something you could semi-mentor on if I were to undertake
>> it? :).
>
> Yes, no problem. I'd be happy to help in any way if you were to implement
> it. And I'd *really* want this to happen. GNU Classpath is not evolving
> anymore, and still has some compatibilities/performance problems.
> I don't know how decoupled from the runtime the OpenJDK libraries are, but
> on the VMKit front, it should not be too hard to replace GNU Classpath's
> requirements with OpenJDK's. You just need to be really familiar with
> OpenJDK on how the boot system works.
>

Hi Nicolas,

I'm writing you to let you know that I've begun work on this (porting
VMKit to OpenJDK), and I've reached the point where I'd like to start
a conversation with you about the entire process/project, and to start
working towards getting these changes pushed upstream as appropriate.
I'm especially keen on getting some feedback/discussion/code review,
as while I'm making good progress much of this is new to me and it can
be tricky to get right.

To give you a rough idea of the status of this work: the present port
can bootstrap (including the optional precompilation) and can run
things like "Hello World" and other similarly trivial applications.
While I'm sure there are a few core issues, I think at the moment the
largest deficiency is an incomplete implementation of the
JVM/JNI/sun.misc.Unsafe.* set of calls.

Anyway, please let me know your thoughts on this and how to best move
forward (should I start sending patches? where? where should
discussion go? etc).

Thanks for your time,

~Will