HotSpot just got Hotter - IcedTea6 support for latest HotSpot

[Andrew Haley]

Mark Wielaard wrote:

> - We want an easy mechanism for trying out newer hotspots so you can
> easily build a newer version and let people try out performance
> improvements or new features/flags (but on top of the stable 6 core
> build). I really like this part of Andrew's patch, which lets you select
> either a hg revision/version number or a prepackaged hotspot src zip.

Well, yeah, it's nice, but this isn't worth doing if the need to support
pluggable VMs leads to cruft in other areas.

> - We want to support the linux/sparc bits (the various
> icedtea-sparc-*.patches). Some of this is actually already in newer
> hotspots.
> - We want to support zero/shark. Ideally without having to have separate
> sets of ZERO_PATCHES and NON_ZERO_PATCHES (all our NON_ZERO_PATCHES are
> actually rebases of ZERO_PATCHES to older hotspot versions). This
> requires a hotspot that includes at a minimum the C++ interpreter.

Yes, it does.

> What is the best way to combine all these properties and keep our
> maintance level as low as possible. Which hotspot version(s) to support
> by default that make it easy to provide support for all of the above
> requirements. Did I forget anything?

You have to ask: is this flexible configury part of the solution, or
part of the problem?  Right now it's not clear to me.

Generally speaking, new hotspot is better than old.  We run the risk
that multiple build options will make the system fragile.  It's much
better, where possible, to have everyone building the same sources.

Andrew.