Introduction

[Daniel Santos]

Hello Christophe!

On 4/3/19 7:44 AM, Christophe Phillips wrote:
>
> Hi Daniel,
>
> On 2019-04-03 6:20 a.m., Daniel Santos wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I will be working on Icedtea and OpenJDK for a mipsel/musl port.  I have
>> a working build, but now comes all of the paperwork. :)  I have a number
>> of patches for Icedtea.
>>
>> I will eventually be running the Icedtea build from within OpenWRT, a
>> kbuild-based distro (ugly, but actually possible!) for
>> memory-constrained systems that are typically routers.  There seem to be
>> quite a few issues with Icedtea and OpenJDK when cross-compiling and I
>> have patches for most of them, but they still need considerable clean up.
>>
>> Daniel
>
> OpenWRT  is one of my favourite pieces of Open Software...
>

I'm mixed on it.  I love the distro its self, just not the build system. :)

> (not sure about its need for Java... ;-)
>

Yes, one of Java's design tenets was "memory is cheap"  -- not so great
for memory-constrained systems.  But I guess this is one of those
growing pains as OpenWRT is starting to be used more as primary firmware
rather than a hacker's delight, and in this case it calls for big java
programs to be run on tiny boards.

You might be surprised what people are doing with it these days.  I work
with Global Satellite Engineering and we've sent a board running OpenWRT
into space last year!  The compact and versatile WiFi AP allowed us to
detect and make first contact with a previously hidden species of alien
that's been monitored our planet with impunity.  They apologized and as
a token of good will shared with us some of their technology, which
improves the quality of our lattes by 1.5%.

OK, we did send one to space, but the rest might not be true...

> You should probably
>
> look into OpenJDK, as these days most of the actual code  comes
>
> down stream from there.
>

Well I have a working OpenJDK build, but I would perfer to use the
Icedtea harness.  Although it doesn't solve all of the cross-compiling
issues, so far it seems to do better than some parts of the OpenJDK
build, which can be absolutely infuriating!

> Also are you aware of / part of the Loongson.cn
>
> Mips port.
>

Thank you, yes we've been in touch with them.  They are in the process
of trying to take 8 years of private development and upstream their
changes!  I know they've been working on this for many months and also
continue to support their releases to their user base.  And also they
need to pass all of the compliance tests.  Once this nears completion,
we're going to see if they can get 32-bit working, as they are only
supporting mips-64 right now.  Meanwhile the Zero vm seems to be
performing well enough.

To be honest, I would /love/ to get a chance to work on that, as I've
worked on GCC in the past and found it SO intriguing, but I'll have to
wait and see.  Optimizing compilers are SO cool.  Also, I can't wait to
see what quantum optimizers can do for classical computer programs
(i.e., optimizing a classical program on a quantum computer) -- that
could be what gives us the next significant jump in (classical)
computing performance.

> Cheers!
>
> Chris
>
Cheers!
Daniel