Status of non-Hotspot VMs and Shark

[Xerxes Rånby]

2012-09-23 11:05, Florian Weimer skrev:
> What's the status of Shark, JamVM and Cocoa for OpenJDK 6 and 7?  Are
> they officially released/supported?  What about the zero port?
> 
> I'm wondering which of these VMs should be part of the upcoming Debian
> stable release.
> 

### Zero
Zero is actively maintained and all around stable.
Zero includes an assembler optimized interpreter for ARM and a thumb2 jit for armv7.
Zero + OpenJDK 6  Icedtea 1.11.4 = OK
Zero + OpenJDK 7  Icedtea 2.3.2 = OK
tested configure flags:
--enable-zero
and
--with-additional-vms=zero

### Shark
Shark (zero+shark) is unmaintained and considered broken.
Do not package.

### JamVM
JamVM is actively maintained and all around stable.
JamVM + OpenJDK 6  Icedtea 1.11.4 = OK, a more stable upstream release exist to be released with 1.12.
use this patch
http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/icedtea6/rev/fb1137cef484
to use the latest JamVM in combination with IcedTea6 1.11.x before the next IcedTea 6 1.12 hits the streets.

JamVM + OpenJDK 7  Icedtea 2.3.2 = OK
tested configure flags:
--enable-jamvm
and
--with-additional-vms=jamvm
* This --with-additional-vms=jamvm combination require a SONAME patch on top of JamVM.
This jamvm-avoid-version-soname.patch SONAME patch is currently only in use by ubuntu.
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-branches/ubuntu/quantal/openjdk-7/quantal/revision/30#debian/patches/jamvm-avoid-version-soname.patch
Sent and waiting for review upstream.
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=29763831

### CACAO
Cacao is actively maintained and stable in combination with OpenJDK 6.
Cacao + OpenJDK 6  Icedtea 1.11.4 = OK
--enable-cacao
and
--with-additional-vms=cacao
There is a new upstream cacao 1.6.0 release that should be merged and used by IcedTea6.
http://www.cacaojvm.org/

Cacao + OpenJDK 7  Icedtea 2.3.2 = unstable
The CACAO OpenJDK 7 port is immature, it can run HelloWorld and some numerical simple benchmarks
but refuses to run real world applications that access file IO.
Do not package.

### Avian
Avian is actively maintained and rapidly approaching stable.
Avian + OpenJDK 7  IcedTea 2.3.2 = OK
Avian is preferably built separately from src after the main OpenJDK 7 build.
Avian is packaged in Ubuntu 12.10 and show great performance on embeded devices.
Latest deb source and merge request:
https://code.launchpad.net/~xranby/ubuntu/quantal/avian/avian_0.6+20120924/+merge/126005
http://oss.readytalk.com/avian/

Cheers
Xerxes