Improving OpenJDK for FreeBSD

[Thomas Stüfe]

Hi Harald,

Welcome to the OpenJDK project. I am happy to see BSD getting some love
after laying dormant for so many years.

Adding to what David wrote:

BSD has always been an outlier port because it was tolerated even though
there was little commitment from anyone. The work that did happen was in
downstream forks of older JDKs. I think that is in part because of a
technicality: in hotspot, BSD and MacOS abstraction layer are in the same
source files, so BSD flew a bit under the radar. But this is not perfect.
Depending on how many changes are needed in that layer, I wonder whether we
should split bsd off from a new macos tree and cleanly separate those two.

Is your involvement temporary, or will the Foundation continue to fund you?

Working on 24 is not perfect; I would work in mainline instead. It should
be stable enough to work in it directly.

Cheers, Thomas



On Wed, Feb 5, 2025 at 2:26 AM David Holmes <david.holmes at oracle.com> wrote:

> Hi Harald,
>
> On 31/01/2025 4:17 am, Harald Eilertsen wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I've been contracted by The FreeBSD Foundation to try to improve OpenJDK
> > support for the FreeBSD operating system. Currently the BSD port lives
> > in a separate github org over at https://github.com/battleblow, but we'd
> > like to make porting easier and more streamlined in the future by
> > submitting our changes to the mainline OpenJDK repo.
> >
> > Currently I'm thinking the best approach is to submit small, self
> > contained patches adressing specific issues when trying to build on
> > FreeBSD. Both to make reviewing more manageable, but also to get
> > feedback so that we ensure the changes integrate as smoothly with the
> > OpenJDK project as possible.
> >
> > Will it be best to create a JBS issue for each change, or one issue for
> > the entire effort?
>
> Can you create a PR against mainline so that we can see the scope of the
> changes and how they have been implemented? That would allow for a
> technical appraisal of what is involved in supporting FreeBSD.
>
> Knowing the technical scope would also aid evaluation of whether this
> needs to be treated as a full porting project, or whether it can just be
> accommodated the way we, for example, accommodate the MUSL libc used on
> Alpine Linux. Is this a re-vamp of the BSD-port project [1] or is this a
> distinct effort? I think the Porters Group [2] will need to weigh-in on
> this either way (cc'd).
>
> Thanks,
> David
>
> [1] https://openjdk.org/projects/bsd-port/
> [2] https://openjdk.org/groups/porters/
>
>
>
> > Thanks in advance!
> >
> > Harald Eilertsen
> > --
> > Eilertsens Kodeknekkeri
> > https://kodeknekkeriet.net
>
>
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