FW: Announcing Finalists for the OpenJDK Community Innovator's Challenge

[Andrew Haley]

Kelly O'Hair wrote:
> Excellent points Steve. And good summary.
> 
> The hotspot nmake Makefiles are tied to the MS Visual Studio (VC)
> compilers,
> and I'm pretty sure nmake.exe is now only delivered with the VC product.
> It's not clear how you can match this build performance.
> However, it's also not clear how much of this benefit comes from Hotspot's
> use of VC pre-compiled headers (PCH). Windows builds with nmake/VC/PCH
> takes a few minutes, versus 20-35min builds on equivalent Linux/Solaris
> systems. So it's significant and something (the performance) that we want
> to keep. If a GNU Makefile using VC/PCH can match nmake is an open
> question.

This is interesting.  I guess the Linux build isn't using PCH too?

> I have tried using parallel GNU make and batch compiles in the jdk
> builds, and seen benefits on Linux and Solaris, but not much with
> Windows.

Ah, that is important: IME builds scale almost linearly with the number
of processors.

Andrew.