RFR: 8273494: Zero: Put libjvm.so into "zero" folder, not "server"

Andrew John Hughes andrew at openjdk.java.net
Fri Sep 10 15:51:49 UTC 2021


On Thu, 9 Sep 2021 14:31:19 GMT, Magnus Ihse Bursie <ihse at openjdk.org> wrote:

>> Currently, the build system defaults the libjvm.so location to "server".  This makes looking for `libjvm.so` awkward, see JDK-8273487 for example. We need to see if moving the libjvm.so to a proper location breaks anything. 
>> 
>> Additional testing:
>>  - [x] Linux x86_64 Zero build
>>  - [x] Linux x86_64 Zero bootcycle-images
>>  - [ ] Linux x86_64 Zero `tier1`
>
> And as for @dholmes-ora comment: I'm not sure who "own" zero at this point in time. Aleksey has made a lot of the zero patches lately; does that not count? Are you thinking about any specific person that needs to weight in on this?

> > @magicus every "port" in OpenJDK is supposed to have a clear owner and support system. Zero has been somewhat lacking in that area but there were enough people to keep it surviving. Now I'm not so sure. Does Zero have an active user community? Developer community? If so they are the ones who need to assess this change.
> 
> FWIW, Zero had fallen into Red Hat hands for support. The official lead (if you look at Census) is Gary Benson, who is not active in this project anymore. Since then, it was mostly supported by RH folks (like me) with contributions from Debian, Tencent, Huawei, Alibaba -- mostly because all of us have arch ports that do not have full-blown Server VMs yet.

For clarity, Gary was a part of the Red Hat Java team at the time, so it has always been a Red Hat project. At the time, the only JIT ports in OpenJDK were x86, x86-64 and SPARC, so the other architectures Red Hat supported (ppc, ppc64, s390, s390x) needed some way to at least build and run to allow OpenJDK packages to be shipped, even if end users desiring greater performance used some other JDK.

As OpenJDK has gained further JIT ports, the use of Zero has declined in response. For example, we can build OpenJDK 17 on every architecture we need without using Zero, so it's not going to receive that kind of "you broke our build" testing any more. It is still used for 8u & 11u, and is definitely worth keeping alive to help bootstrap any new ports.

So, in short, the owner has always been and remains Red Hat, even if the individual personnel have changed. The formal project represents a time when it was maintained outside the mainline OpenJDK, so there has been no need to update that for a long time, as any JDK project committer can make changes to the code in the main JDK project.

> 
> I have put things in motion to claim the leadership more formally. I do have to note, though, that over the last few years of me whipping Zero into shape, this is the first time anyone asked the formal governance question, which must tell us something about how much we care about ownership formalities here ;)

Most of the OpenJDK committers at Red Hat have pushed Zero fixes at some time, myself included, as need has arisen. This has the first time this has been raised to my knowledge.

Regarding this change itself, I think it's fine for trunk, where there's time to shake out any issues for OpenJDK 18, but I wouldn't want to backport it. These kind of changes tend to throw up things only when someone's application breaks, and, at least if that's a new JDK version, that's somewhat expected.

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PR: https://git.openjdk.java.net/jdk/pull/5440


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