On 30/04/11 00:05, Kelly O'Hair wrote:
On Apr 29, 2011, at 1:31 PM, Steve Poole wrote:
On 26/04/11 15:54, Kelly O'Hair wrote:
On Apr 26, 2011, at 12:59 AM, Steve Poole wrote:
* Allow for use of more portable build tools (compilers etc.) where possible
Can I add support for alternative JVM's ?
Seems a bit out of scope to me.
Sorry, it was a bit of a flippant one liner, I owe you more details.
There are three usecases I see that require the OpenJDK build process
to be modified to accommodate:
The first is bootstrapping a build. I'd like to be able to build
OpenJDK on a new platform without the need for a previous SDK build
to be present.
In this usecase it's possible that an simple interpreter based JVM
would be sufficient (ie Zero) (or even maybe a cross compiling mode)
The second is getting OpenJDK to build on a platform where a
hotspot JVM doesn't exist and may never exist. As you guess I'm
thinking of IBM platforms specifically. I'm don't expect to port
Hotspot to AIX so I need to be able to make the OpenJDK build work
with J9.
The third (a variant of the 2nd) is where another JVM vendor wants
to get OpenJDK working with their JVM - regardless of the
availability of a Hotspot JVM on the target platform.
To be clear. I'm not suggesting that this project step up to
defining the interfaces between JVM and classes. This is simple
pragmatics. The Hotspot JVM is the starting point for the mould and I
would expect to make J9 (or any new JVM) fit into it as much as
possible. However there will be changes needed. These are mostly
simple, like parameterising JVM command line options, to the more
complicated like separating out JVM intrinsic classes such as
String.java, Object.java, Thread.java etc so that the right versions
get build and packaged.
I certainly can understand these needs, but it is still seems beyond
the initial scope of this project.
Maybe in a phase 2?
Hmm, maybe doing all of them in one go may be a stretch :-) The 2nd
usecase is fundamental though to supporting IBM platforms, something you
mentioned you wanted to do. Is there any reason why realising that
usecase is beyond phase 1?
-kto
