Building OpenJDK 7 on Windows XP

Tue May 20 10:43:28 UTC 2008

Well I'm happy to report I finally got the full build to work,  
although it took another 15 hours or so.

The last two big issues I encountered:

1. Unfamiliarity with the freetype project, so had to figure out what  
needed to be built. This project is rather complicated. It supports  
building on at least 11 platforms, and allows for multiple compilers/ 
environments on many of these platforms. There are 14 different build  
systems supported on Windows alone!

Also, this project is highly configurable, and you can build it with  
support for many optional features. So someone from the OpenJDK  
architecture team will have to decide what is officially included in  
this library when it is built for the OpenJDK project. And the build  
code for it will have to be included in the jdk7 Makefile system.

I was able to build it by tweaking the VC 8 file included, and  
opening in VS .Net 2003. I compiled from within VS, then ran the link  
script I found via a link in this list's archive to create the  
freetype.dll and freetype.lib. The "aha" moment was when I realized  
there were actually TWO .lib files being created, a large static one  
aroung 800K, and a smaller one around 40K. I needed to use the  
smaller one along with the dll.

2. This is most likely a cygwin issue, but I continually experienced  
deadlocks/starvation of the spawned gmake processes. cygwin's gmake  
seems to ignore the -j option. At any one time I could have a bash  
process, a few shell processes, and up to 9 gmake processes running.  
I could easily tell when a deadlock occurred - my computer would go  
from sounding like a jet engine to being totally quiet. Then I tried  
to guess what gmake process was the oldest (not sure if window's task  
manager sorts them by process ID or creation time, so this is just a  
guess) and killed that one, and then the build would continue, but  
obviously with errors as some task was not completed.

I had to try to rebuild more than 5 times before it finally got  
through it all. But in the end it completed with no errors.

java -version worked! Good start

java HelloWorld worked! Getting better.

Going for it, I tried SwingSet2 and Java2D demos from the 1.6 JDK..  
AND THEY WORKED!

I did get an error in the Java2D demo complaining about missing a  
JPEG decoder, but I was too happy the build had worked to really  
worry about that right now.

So add another success story to this list.

Rob Ross, Lead Software Engineer
E! Networks

---------------------------------------------------
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his  
heart he dreams himself your master." -- Commissioner Pravin Lal

On May 19, 2008, at 8:44 AM, Kelly O'Hair wrote:

>
>
> Rob Ross wrote:
>> Hi there everyone.
>> This will officially be my first email to the OpenJDK project.
>
> Welcome. I actually appreciate the email, some comments below.
>
>> I got to attend a couple of sessions/BOFs at JavaOne2008 about  
>> OpenJDK and my interest was piqued. I've been playing with the  
>> build for the last week. (A more accurate description would be,  
>> "yanking my hair out and cursing my computer quite often", but I  
>> supposed it's part of the learning curve.)
>
> You did pick the most difficult platform you know. ;^)
>
> These are the notes and action items I see from your comments:
>
> 1. assembling the prerequisite software
>   - VS .Net 2003  -  Will be changing soon to a newer VC compiler,  
> and if
>     at all possible the free one.
>   - Ant is a requirement, I'll fix the Build README, findbugs is  
> not strictly
>     a requirement, it's under discussion, I had hoped to use it as  
> part of the build.
>     I may be removing the sanity check on findbugs.
>   - Cygwin is a bit of a challenge, it changes/updates rather  
> often, I'll
>     try and correct the references to the packages you mention, but
>     it's like the different Linux packages, sometimes all I can  
> give is hints.
>   - The Build README should have some references to the older  
> cygwin 'make'
>     now, but I'll double check. I kind of hoped it would fix itself  
> someday. :^(
>   - Freetype is new to many of us, I use a freetype that someone  
> else built
>     so I have never experienced building it myself.
>     I will try and look into this and see if I can document it better.
>
> 2. Mercurial
>   - CVS/Subversion users seem to have trouble understanding the  
> distributed
>     nature of Mercurial. I'd recommend looking at the first few  
> chapters
>     of the Mercurial book: http://hgbook.red-bean.com/hgbook.html
>
> 3. Setting up the ALT_* environment variables
>   - If I didn't document this I should have, my apologies, but I  
> encourage
>     all ALT_* variables to use the C:/ style of paths, not C:\ and  
> definitely
>     not the /cygdrive/ style paths.
>     The makefiles try and turn the C:\ paths into C:/, but using  
> the cygwin
>     paths are more difficult to deal with.
>     The problem is that some of the exe's we use understand these  
> paths and
>     some don't, almost everything understands C:/, and avoiding the  
> use of
>     \ characters in shell scripts and Makefiles is a very sane  
> thing to do.
>     Making matters worse, the cygwin 'make' that stopped working  
> with C:
>     paths for a while, hopefully this gets fixed someday.
>     Of course cygwin PATH must use ':' characters to separate  
> paths, so
>     you have to use /cygdrive/ paths in PATH.
>     The LIB and INCLUDE env variables belong to the VS2003 compiler  
> and
>     they use a ';' separator and need the C:/ paths.
>     See my blog:
>        http://blogs.sun.com/kto/entry/windows_cygwin_mks_java_and
>
> I suspect that your experience with MacOS X will not be the same as  
> Windows.
>
> Thanks for taking the time to make the comments.
>
> -kto
>
>> I was finally able to get "make sanity" to pass this evening, and  
>> I felt quite pleased with myself. However, I have no expectations  
>> that this will actually build now - but I still consider this a  
>> milestone victory.
>> Some of the difficulties I encountered were
>> 1. Just assembling the prerequisite software
>> The jdk7/README-builds.html actually does a fairly good job of  
>> listing everything needed. But I'm not a Windows developer, so  
>> finding a copy of VS .Net 2003 was a little challenging. Luckily  
>> that install process was pretty simple. The build generates a  
>> warning if Ant and FindBugs aren't locatable; those were easy to  
>> install but perhaps you should add these programs to the list of  
>> requirements in the README. Cygwin was also
>> pretty easy to install after spending a little time reading up on  
>> it. Finding an earlier version of make (gmake) was a little hard,  
>> but I see now there are links in the mailing list archive so that  
>> would be useful to add a link to the README as well.  Some of the  
>> Categories/package names you gave for the particular cygwin  
>> utilities needed may be out of date. Zip and Unzip are found in  
>> the Archive category, not Utils as described in the README. "Free"  
>> is listed as being in Utils but it's actually part of the "procps"  
>> package, under the System category. And there isn't an "awk"  
>> implementation, but there is a gawk. Freetype was the bane of my  
>> existence for 3 days. I never could get the "stock" build scripts  
>> to work with the version you stated was needed (2.3.0), and what  
>> was available to be downloaded (2.3.5). I could not figure out how  
>> to build it from source either via DOS/windows or cygwin. So I  
>> ended up downloading the binary setup executable, which contained  
>> freetype.lib, freetype6.dll, and zlib1.dll, and a freetype.dll.a  
>> that was a red herring. I modified the Makefile for the  
>> freetypecheck tool to change the name of the expected dll from  
>> "freetype.dll" to "freetype6.dll", and added its dependent  
>> "zlib1.dll" to the copy command. Not a very portable solution I  
>> know, but I just wanted to get this thing to work! How is everyone  
>> else getting this to compile?
>> 2. Mercurial - well, it's new, and a little more complicated than  
>> CVS/SVN, but I think I'll get the hang of it. I fcloned from the  
>> jdk7 master forest, (using the forest extension) yesterday, so I  
>> have the latest code (baring any changes in the last day). It will  
>> be a while before I even have to worry about wanting to submit  
>> anything back upstream, so I should be more comfortable with how  
>> it all works by then.
>> 3. Setting up the ALT_* environment variables
>> The hardest part, and mostly trial-and-error, was determining what  
>> variables needed to use the cygwin path syntax, and what needed to  
>> use the normal Windows path syntax, and what needed to be  
>> "shortcutted" by using the cygpath utility. This was mind  
>> numbingly frustrating!!!! I found an email from Tim Bell that  
>> included his sample script that was quite helpful in getting the  
>> right directories from the VS .Net 2003 install into the PATH,  
>> LIB, and INCLUDE variables, with the right syntax. As I was  
>> writing this email my initial "gmake all" build failed, due to  
>> javac not being able to find the binary plugins I had specified in  
>> ALT_BINARY_PLUGINS_PATH. It seems THAT one needs to be a java IO  
>> file path! So now there are THREE different path syntaxes in use  
>> in this script file :)
>> Anyway, I just wanted to share my experiences building the OpenJDK  
>> 7 on Windows.
>> Ironically, I'm only doing this to get some practice on the  
>> existing build process. My ultimate goal is to port the OpenJDK 7  
>> to Mac OS X, as a full native app. I'm doing some preliminary  
>> analysis on the existing code base to determine all calls to  
>> native methods, to get  a sense of the scope. For example, there  
>> are currently about 421 native method calls in the jdk/src/share  
>> classes. The Windows implementation classes make 210 native calls,  
>> and the Solaris implementation makes 299. But the first task would  
>> be to integrate Mac OS build targets into the OpenJDK 7 project,  
>> so it can be built on that platform. (Of course, it won't actually  
>> run without any native implementation - that's step #2.) But I'll  
>> be making a more formal presentation/declaration/request for  
>> sponsorship/ at a later time.
>> Rob Ross