Recent blog entries for twisti

Pheew! After more than one year our codebase was ready to get a new release... so I did. And then I noticed, because I was a bit out of practice doing a release, it had a few bugs. Yeah, of course :-( So I made another one, called 0.99.1.

With official OpenJDK Java runtime library support we are now heading to a 1.0.0 release. I hope that one will be without bugs...

I wanted to change the default font of Emacs without setting properties in the .Xresources. The window font can be changed with:

M-x customize-face RET default RET

I set it to misc-fixed with height 113.

The menubar font can be changed with:

M-x customize-face RET menu RET

I'm still searching for the correct font, but in my .Xresources it was:

Emacs*menubar.font: Lucida

It took me some time to figure that out, because it's not installed per default from CD and I haven't upgraded the whole system yet (because I'm still running on my swap partition).

It's in SUNWgnome-common-devel. Pheew...

Because I didn't know my WIFI password from the top of my head, I entered the wrong one when nwamd(1) was asking for it. But it didn't ask again. So I wondered where the passwords are stored.

After some google'ing I found the correct command:

# dladm show-secobj

Then I could delete the stored password with:

# dladm delete-secobj nwam-twisti-xx.xx.xx.xx.xx.xx

It seems dladm(1) is just a frontend for text files. The passwords are actually stored in /etc/dladm/secobj.conf.

I'm thinking about to switch to OpenSolaris on my Apple mac mini. I installed Indiana on my Linux swap partition to see how it works.

Right now I'm trying to get suspend working (http://blogs.sun.com/randyf/entry/solaris_suspend_and_resume_how), but I'm not sure it will work with this version:

May 28 21:19:41 workstation genunix: [ID 314293 kern.info]
device pci8086,27a2@2(display#0) keeps up device
sd@0,0(sd#0), but the latter is not power managed

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 :-)