Workshop proposal: Maintaining universal buildability

[Aleksey Shipilev]

Hi,

Another infra/cross-cutting discussion proposal.

TITLE: Maintaining universal buildability

ABSTRACT: OpenJDK targets multiple architectures and OSes. Yet, (IIRC) Oracle builds x86_64 only,
Oracle-led jdk-submit verifies only those, and all this leaves other maintainers to catch up with
build failures after features/patches were committed. Additionally, there are JVM variants and
features that need to be checked for buildability. Additionally, there are build configuration
intricacies: precompiled headers, different toolchains, etc. All these fixes add up for backports,
where both the original patch and all the build/platform fixups need to be backported together. This
discussion is to catch up who builds what, why, what tricks builders use, and how crazy should we go
with maintaining the buildability.

PLAN (tentative, off the top of my head):
 - Show of hands: who builds what and why
 - Discussing build configs:
    *) No precompiled headers builds to verify includes
    *) x86_32 builds to maintain 32-bit cleanness;
    *) Minimal VM builds to check JVM features can be cleanly disabled;
    *) Zero VM builds to check JVM is able to run on platforms without ports;
    *) ...
 - Discussing non-x86 platforms builds:
    *) Cross-compilation as the sanity check?
    *) How far do we go? E.g. Linux/SPARC, anyone?
    *) ...
 - Discussing remote builds:
    *) Experience with cloud services for builds
    *) Virtualizing Windows nodes
    *) MacOS X virtualization troubles
    *) Solaris, anyone cares?
    *) ...
 - Discussing newer/alternative toolchains:
    *) How it all fits the "supported toolchains" for OpenJDK
    *) Building with newer GCC with new warnings
    *) Building with Clang for the warnings
    *) ...

LENGTH: long

BIO, BLOGS: http://shipilev.net/, https://builds.shipilev.net/, @shipilev

Thanks,
-Aleksey