Hi - is there a group of people working on OpenJDK 8 for OpenBSD?

[Kurt Miller]

On Mon, 2015-04-27 at 15:10 -0400, Bryan C. Everly wrote:
> Makes sense to me.  I totally understand what you are saying about
> compiling vs. actually making it work.  I'm just trying to get a feel
> for how big the "bread box" is (i.e. how much work am I signing up
> for).  Once I understand the specific hacks I had to do in order to
> get it compiling, I'll be going back and making them correctly.  I
> appreciate what you are saying (I maintained a proprietary, multi
> platform GUI programming language written entirely in C++ at a
> previous job and can't tell you how difficult it is to trace a bug
> that shows up in the end-user code back to the interpreter).

One way to get an idea about the OpenBSD specific parts would be to
compare jdk7u/jdk7u to bsd-port/bsd-port as follows:

hg clone http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk7u/jdk7u
cd jdk7u
sh get_source.sh
cd ..
hg clone http://hg.openjdk.java.net/bsd-port/bsd-port
cd bsd-port
sh get_source.sh
diff -uNpr -x build -x .hg\* -x \*.orig -x .hg -x .jcheck ../jdk7u .
> ../jdk7u-vs-bsd-port.diff

This is shows the complete set of changes from Oracle's code base to our
code base for OpenJDK7. Greg and perhaps others have ported this over to
bsd-port/jdk8, so most of that work is done. Taking a quick peak at the
OpenBSD specific parts and I'm surprised how little is left. At one time
there was quite a bit of OpenBSD specific code needed. Hmm, actually I
just noticed some of our bsd-port changes make it into jdk7u already, so
this diff doesn't show all of the needed changes. I guess the next best
thing would be to do:

cd bsd-port
grep OpenBSD -IR .

This will get you pointed at the changes that were needed for OpenBSD in
OpenJDK 7. I think you will find that much of it was ported forward into
bsd-port/jdk8 when FreeBSD ported over to jdk8.

Some of the most critical code to get right lives in:

./hotspot/src/os/bsd/vm/
and
./hotspot/src/os_cpu/bsd_x86/vm/

Problems in these areas generally leave you with a jdk that just doesn't
work. One good general test of the jdk is to build it, copy out the
resulting jdk image and use it to bootstrap the next build.

> On the agreement front, I'll double-check with my company to be
> certain they won't object to me signing it (we push upstream patches
> to most of the Open Source projects we use so I don't think it will be
> a problem) and get it sent over.  I created an account with the
> username 'bceverly' that I'll reference in the document when I send it
> in.

Thanks. Let me know when you've sent it in so I can be on the lookout
for your name showing up on the OCA list.

Regards,
-Kurt