no gcj-jdk + no ecj + building openjdk

[Dr Andrew John Hughes]

On 09:27 Thu 18 Nov     , Mark Wielaard wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-11-18 at 11:31 +0530, ramakanth varala wrote:
> > My target is to get openjdk build for target board (ARM) .
> > 
> > In the process i thought i would build openjdk first to my host
> > machine i.e of fedora 8.
> 
> Fedora 8 is very outdated (3 years old). Although IcedTea (7) has been
> bootstrapped on it, it isn't maintained anymore. You might have better
> luck if you update to a more modern version (Fedora 14 is the latest).
> 
> > Iam confused of lot of things here
> > 
> > 1) what is icedtea ?
> 
> IcedTea is a fully free Java Runtime and Development Environment. Build
> upon OpenJDK extended with developer, user and web browser tools like an
> Applet viewer, Java Webstart (LiveConnect and JNLP) support and
> VisualVM, a lightweight profiler and troubleshooting tool. Bootstraps
> with and provides alternative runtimes, tools and class library support
> for Java and Java-like environments, like the Zero interpreter, Shark
> JIT, GCJ native compiler, GNU Classpath core libraries and Cacao. See
> http://icedtea.classpath.org/
> 

Zero & Shark are now part of OpenJDK.

> > 2) How is icedtea related to openjdk?
> 
> OpenJDK is a free reference implementation for the Java Standard Edition
> Developer Kit. Includes an execution environment, development tools and
> a class library for the Java programming language. IcedTea extends this.
> 

Notably, IcedTea is required for plugin and Web Start support.
The packages in most distros which claim to be OpenJDK are actually
IcedTea.  An easy way to check is to see if a plugin and javaws binary
are included.  I haven't heard of any distros shipping OpenJDK as supplied
upstream.

> > 3) can i build this for the arm board ?
> 
> Yes, it should natively build on an arm board. But that might be slow,
> so you might want to cross-compile...
> 
> > 4) can you point me to proper documentation where i can get a clear
> > picture of cross-compilation to arm?
> 
> See http://icedtea.classpath.org/wiki/CrossCompileFaq
> 

I'm not sure how up-to-date this document is.  It does have noticeable typos.

There should be support for ARM in IcedTea via Zero, Shark and the ARM assembler
port (I'm not sure of the maintenance level of the latter).

The best advice is probably to give it a try and go on IRC if you hit problems.
I believe Xerces (xranby) does regular ARM builds and is usually online in
#openjdk on the OFTC network.

> Cheers,
> 
> Mark
> 

-- 
Andrew :)

Free Java Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)

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