NIO2 support in IcedTea6

[Andrew John Hughes]

I've just committed support for NIO2 to IcedTea6.  This is enabled by
default but may be disabled using --disable-nio2.  The majority of
support is provided in the overlays subdirectory under a new nio2
tree.  In addition, patches/icedtea-nio2.patch adds the necessary
support to the Makefiles and some of the native code.

To retain compatibility with Java 1.6, the classes are provided under
the org.classpath.icedtea package prefix (so the updated java.io.File
becomes org.classpath.icedtea.java.io.File and so on).  Thus, when
compiling NIO2 code against IcedTea6, you will need to add this
prefix.  When support is ported over to IcedTea7, this extension will
be dropped and support added directly to the java.* classes
(effectively making it equivalent to the NIO2 tree, but with the
ability to use the main OpenJDK7 tarballs and IcedTea extensions).

I'll blog about this in more detail shortly with some examples, but
feel free to start trying NIO2 and report any issues caused by the
backport. More about NIO2 is available here:

http://openjdk.java.net/projects/nio/

This work is funded by Red Hat, with the aim of providing early access
to NIO2 technologies for users of IcedTea.

Happy hacking,
-- 
Andrew :-)

IcedTea/OpenJDK Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)

Support Free Java!
Contribute to GNU Classpath and the OpenJDK
http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath
http://openjdk.java.net

PGP Key: 94EFD9D8 (http://subkeys.pgp.net)
Fingerprint: F8EF F1EA 401E 2E60 15FA  7927 142C 2591 94EF D9D8