IcedTea on ARM

[Andrew Haley]

Andrew John Hughes wrote:
> On 24/11/2008, Jan Pannecoeck <jpa at mgb-tech.com> wrote:

>>  I'm currently working with an ARM9261 with OpenEmbedded running on
>>  it, linux kernel version 2.6.22. I'm currently using JamVM as
>>  virtual machine but I'm thinking about using IcedTea maybe, because
>>  performancy issues. Now my question is, if the currently version of
>>  IcedTea could work properly on an ARM with OpenEmbedded linux and
>>  also can be build for the ARM of course. And since the main problems are
>>  performancy issues, I'm wondering if IcedTea is faster than JamVM?
>>
>>  The IcedTea website tells me that IcedTea is only been build on x86,
>>  x86_64, pcc and ppc64 architectures, but I hope that someone can give me
>>  some more information about IcedTea running on an ARM.
> 
> IcedTea on ARM relies on using either Gary Benson's work on Zero/Shark
> to provide a port of HotSpot to the architecture or on using CACAO as
> the VM instead with the OpenJDK class library.
> 
> I'm not sure how performance will compare with JamVM.  API
> completeness of the class library will be better using the OpenJDK
> class library over GNU Classpath, but Zero will definitely be much
> slower.  I don't know if Gary has tried Shark on ARM yet and what the
> results are.  CACAO and OpenJDK may be your best choice for now, which
> means building IcedTea with ./configure --with-cacao.

Yes.  Right now the high performance options on ARM are Cacao and gcj.
The other possible problems are the footprint size of the whole system:
I expect IcedTea is going to be a lot bigger than Cacao + GNU Classpath.

Andrew.