Project Proposal: Build Infrastructure Changes

[Kelly O'Hair]

On Apr 29, 2011, at 1:31 PM, Steve Poole wrote:

> 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.

I certainly can understand these needs, but it is still seems beyond the initial scope of this project.
Maybe in a phase 2?

-kto

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