HotSpot just got Hotter - IcedTea6 support for latest HotSpot

[Andrew John Hughes]

2008/12/2 Andrew Haley <aph at redhat.com>:
> 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.
>


Zero is now supported so I've pushed to the main tree.  We can drop
support for the bundled HotSpot once we know things are stable.
-- 
Andrew :-)

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