Project Proposal: Build Infrastructure Changes

[Steve Poole]

On 26/04/11 15:54, Kelly O'Hair wrote:
>
> On Apr 26, 2011, at 12:59 AM, Steve Poole wrote:
>
>>>>
>>>>    * Allow for use of more portable build tools (compilers etc.) where possible
>>    Can I add support for alternative JVM's ?
>
> Seems a bit out of scope to me.
>
Sorry, it was  a bit of a flippant one liner,  I owe you more details.

There are three usecases I see that require the OpenJDK build process to 
be modified to accommodate:

The first is bootstrapping a build.   I'd like to be able to build 
OpenJDK on a new platform without the need for a previous SDK build to 
be present.
In this usecase it's possible that an simple interpreter based JVM would 
be sufficient (ie Zero)   (or even  maybe a cross compiling mode)

The second  is  getting OpenJDK to build on a platform where a hotspot 
JVM doesn't exist and may never exist.   As you guess I'm thinking of 
IBM platforms specifically. I'm don't expect to port Hotspot to AIX so I 
need to be able to make the OpenJDK build work with J9.

The third (a variant of the 2nd)  is where another JVM vendor wants to 
get OpenJDK working with their JVM - regardless of the availability of a 
Hotspot JVM on the target platform.

To be clear.  I'm not suggesting that this project step up to defining 
the interfaces between JVM and classes.   This is simple pragmatics. The 
Hotspot JVM is the starting point for the mould and I would expect to 
make J9 (or any new JVM) fit into it as much as possible.   However 
there will be changes needed.  These are mostly simple,  like 
parameterising  JVM command line options,  to the more complicated like 
separating out  JVM intrinsic classes such as String.java, Object.java,  
Thread.java etc so that the right versions get build and packaged.

> -kto
>

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