Older blog entries for twisti (starting at number 19)

Today I was able for the first time to build OpenJDK on OpenSolaris completely with free tools. Unfortunately I couldn't use use CACAO as bootstrap VM because Boehm-GC has some problems on OpenSolaris, which I couldn't fix yet.

Since GCJ also uses Boehm-GC, I decided to use JamVM. The port was very straight-forward, except one small getcwd problem for which Robert already had a fix for. I will contribute all JamVM changes back to Robert.

After some IcedTea build system changes (yet to commit), some JVMTI file copying (maybe this is a JamVM bug, see instructions at the end), a small OpenJDK patch and some time, I got:

IcedTea is served: openjdk/control/build/solaris-i586

And, obviously, the build works:

$ uname -a
SunOS workstation 5.11 snv_98 i86pc i386 i86pc Solaris
$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_0"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_0-b12)
OpenJDK Server VM (build 1.6.0_0-b12, mixed mode)

I tried to write down all stuff that needs to be done here, but I'm very sure some steps are missing...

Two days ago I actually released CACAO 0.99.3, but didn't have time to do the announcement yet. Nonetheless the release has one very cool feature: you can play Jake2 for the first time! Simply run the Jake2 Webstart (I used the jogl-1.1 one) and start fragging.

Here is a screenshot playing it on x86_64-linux:

It should run on other architectures too, I'll try powerpc when I'm back home.

Yesterday I finally was able to finish the OpenJDK build on Alpha Linux. I'm not exactly sure what really fixed the build, but definitely adding the missing compiler flags again (with -D_LITTLE_ENDIAN) helped. When Gary commited his zero work we lost some architecture dependent flags, I'll re-add them ASAP.

And now to the fun:

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...