Status Roundup

[Landon Fuller]

A quick status round-up on the BSD-Port progress:

> Additionally, there's a lot of work that needs to be done simply to bring OpenJDK 7 (and 6) to a production-level state on Mac OS X:
> 	- Implementing proper "dual-mode" support for x86 and x86-64 JVMs
> 	- Up-to-date openjdk6 release

This work is progressing in MacPorts, largely thanks to external contributions:
	https://trac.macports.org/ticket/20956#comment:57

> 	- Re-sync with JDK7 mainline, fix Mac OS X build errors that have emerged.

Greg Lewis pulled in the latest b116 patchset, which brings the BSD-Port inline with upstream OpenJDK7:
	http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/bsd-port-dev/2010-October/001369.html

As Greg noted this also includes Shark, which opens the door to JIT on PPC machines. Greg's work has only seen basic testing on FreeBSD -- it'd be great if Mac users could try this out and report failures, either in building or using it.


> 	- Conformance testing with the TCK
> 	- Real-world usage, testing, and fixing the bugs that are uncovered.
> 	- Out-of-the-box Mac OS X Integration via http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#releasenotes/Java/JavaSnowLeopardUpdate3LeopardUpdate8RN/NewandNoteworthy/NewandNoteworthy.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40010380-CH4-SW1

Angus Hardie has been working on building a OS X integrated VM bundle on Apple's java-dev mailing list:
	http://lists.apple.com/archives/Java-dev/2010/Oct/msg00693.html

> 	- (Possibly) Dtrace support
> 	- (Possibly) PowerPC and ARM support via zero/shark project

PowerPC JIT is possible now given Greg's update to b116; someone with the necessary hardware and interest could try to get this running using the zero-based binaries as a bootstrap VM:
	http://hg.bikemonkey.org/archive/openjdk7_darwin/openjdk7-macppc-2009-12-16-b4.tar.bz2

> 	- AWT/Swing
> 	- Sound

Mandolane has been discussing providing a donation of their sound code to the BSD-Port project:
	http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/sound-dev/2010-October/000110.html

It will be great if we can make use of their code to facilitate sound support.

-landonf