Providing hsdis binaries

[Volker Simonis]

Hi Chris,

that's interesting - I wasn't aware of this problem but I think the
link you provide is quite clear.

Maybe the easiest way to solve this problem would be to convince
Oracle to provide the two files

hotspot/src/share/tools/hsdis/hsdis.c
hotspot/src/share/tools/hsdis/hsdis/hsdis.h

under "GPL V2 or later". These files aren't compiled into the HotSpot
anyway, so maybe they’ll do it (although I don't expect this to be
easy:)

I've added Donald Smith from Oracle who should be familiar with the
legal/licensing stuff.

@Donald: I don't know how familiar you are with the hsdis library. It
actually only consists of the two files mentioned above which act as a
thin wrapper around the GNU binutils. They are compiled and statically
linked with the GNU binutils into a shared library. This library can
be loaded by the HotSpot VM to disassemble the code it generates (e.g.
by using -XX:+PrintAssembly). What do you think?

Regards,
Volker


On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 6:48 PM, Chris Newland
<cnewland at chrisnewland.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> There's a small fire over at jmh-dev regarding hsdis.
>
> I've never had any problems building it from OpenJDK sources on any
> platform but since JITWatch makes use of it I'd like to provide binaries
> (the ones over on Kenai are 5+ years old and binutils / gas which hsdis
> links are still actively developed.
>
> The easiest instructions for building on Windows
> (http://dropzone.nfshost.com/hsdis.htm) claim there's GPL v2 / v3
> incompatibility with binutils which prevents providing binaries.
>
> Any OpenJDK licensing experts care to comment?
>
> I'll ask over at the sourceware mailing list as well.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Chris
> @chriswhocodes
>