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.