HotSpot just got Hotter - IcedTea6 support for latest HotSpot

[Andrew Haley]

Mark Wielaard wrote:

> On Tue, 2008-12-02 at 10:51 +0000, Andrew Haley wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> I think it is a much cleaner way than the current setup,

No argument.

>>> 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.
> 
> Yes. I think the major churn comes from supporting the old openjdk6
> based hotspot because it needs so many backported patches, doesn't
> include sparc, has a different build dir layout, and doesn't come with
> the c++ interpreter for zero. It would be wise to only support newer
> hotspots that have at least most of that fixed.

Of course, but that's not the question.  Obviously we don't want the
old openjdk6 based hotspot.

Andrew.