Today I pulled myself together and tried to build IcedTea for ARM again. I had two options: to build it natively on an ARM board or try to cross-compile it. I decided to try the cross-compile approach.

The build did not fully finish, because I don't have ALSA libraries in my cross-build enviroment, so I just took an j2re-image from an x86_64 build and replaced

bin/java

with the cross-compiled one and copied

openjdk/control/build/linux-arm/lib/arm/

into the x86_64 j2re-image.

And it works!!!

$ uname -m
armv5tejl
$ java -version
java version "1.6.0"
IcedTea Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0-b06)
CACAO (build 0.98+svn, JIT mode)

(btw. this output calls 10273 Java methods)

Now I'm testing applications like DaCapo and most benchmarks of DaCapo already pass in small size.

After some problems with the architecture define in OpenJDK's build system, today I got the stuff built. At least the ECJ-poured one:

$ uname -m
alpha
$ openjdk-ecj/build/linux-alpha/bin/java -version
java version "1.7.0"
IcedTea Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0-b24)
CACAO (build 0.98+svn, JIT mode)
$ openjdk-ecj/build/linux-alpha/bin/java -cp ~/cacao/ HelloWorld
Hello World!

Let's see if I get the whole stuff built...

I had some problems to get IcedTea compiled on our i386, x86_64 and powerpc64 boxes. It turned out to be the -z def linker option and the glibc version used. A little google'ing revealed the fix. Just add the AS_NEEDED directive as shown below:

$ cat /usr/lib64/libc.so 
/* GNU ld script
   Use the shared library, but some functions are only in
   the static library, so try that secondarily.  */
OUTPUT_FORMAT(elf64-powerpc)
GROUP ( /lib/libc.so.6 /usr/lib/libc_nonshared.a AS_NEEDED (
/lib/ld64.so.1 ) )

Yesterday I found the problem why we get a VerifyError when running Eclipse with CACAO-OpenJDK, while HotSpot does not. It's again the MagicAccessorImpl class.

Snippet from sun/reflect/MagicAccessorImpl.java (I overlooked that when debugging the access-check bug):

    The bug fix for 4486457 also necessitated disabling
    verification for this class and all subclasses, as
opposed to just
    SerializationConstructorAccessorImpl and subclasses, to
avoid
    having to indicate to the VM which of these
dynamically-generated
    stub classes were known to be able to pass the verifier. 

Finding these magics is really a pain...

Today I finally made it to build a complete j2sdk-image on powerpc. As IcedTea has support for FreeType, I could run my first GUI application:

This is soooo cool and exciting, I hope I can sleep now :-)