Unification of jni_<platform>.h

Magnus Ihse Bursie magnus.ihse.bursie at oracle.com
Wed Oct 18 13:10:33 UTC 2017


In the context of JDK-8167078 (Duplicate header files in hotspot and 
jdk), I was looking at unifying the platform specific extensions to 
jni.h, the jni_md.h files between hotspot and java.base.

The main difference here is that the hotspot jni_* files are divided 
into individual files based on cpu, while the java.base versions are 
divided according to operating system (which, in turn, implicates 
compiler). On a second look, however, it turns out to not be so 
problematic -- a hotspot file like jni_x86.h contains basically
#ifdef WIN32
... // do windows stuff
#else
... // do posix/macos stuff
#endif

and the two blocks match very well what the java.base versions are doing 
for the different operating systems.

In fact, the OS (and compiler) division seems more natural, since there 
is much redundancy in the hotspot files, and the java.base OS-based 
versions are much simpler.

I'm proposing to remove the hotspot CPU-based files and just replace 
them with the java.base versions. However, a few differences crept out. 
I'd like to discuss them before proceeding.

For jni_aarch64.h: There's a windows (or rather, "not unix") part of the 
jni_aarch64.h that I do not believe have ever been used. Nevertheless, 
it contains "typedef int jint" rather than "typedef long jint", which 
the java.base windows version uses. Since I've never heard of aarch64 
building on Windows, I presume this is irrelevant.

For jni_aarch64.h and jni_sparc.h: The unix version will match with the 
java.base version as long as _LP64 is defined. This should be just fine, 
since we define that when building hotspot/the JDK, and the java.base 
version that is exported by the JDK on linux/aarch64 and solaris/sparc 
has always required the _LP64 define.

(In fact, the macos and unix versions in java.base only contain trivial 
differences. The macos version should probably be removed in favor of a 
single unix version.)

For jni_x86.h: There windows part suffers the same problem as for 
aarch64, but here it's potentially problematic. The hotspot version uses 
"typedef int jint" while the java.base version uses "typedef long jint". 
If this *really* were a problem, we would probably have gotten reports 
from JNI code unable to work on Windows, so I assume this turns out to 
be the same datatype in the end. Don't know if it's due to luck, 
compiler flags or by definition.

For jni_s390.h: Here's the most problematic version. The exported 
java.base version uses:
#ifdef _LP64
typedef long jlong;
#else
typedef long long jlong;
#endif
but s390 uses:
typedef long int jlong;

My best assumption here is that we're only really using s390x (the 
64-bit version) and that "long int" is functionally equivalent to 
"long". Or that jni is broken on s390 and nobody really noticed.

Also, s390 uses a simplified version of the gcc attribute dance used for 
JNIEXPORT/JNIIMPORT. I think the s390 version is just not really 
updated, and that using the newer in java.base is harmless.

For jni_arm.h: Finally, the jni_arm.h (the 32-bit formerly closed Oracle 
port), the JNIEXPORT/JNIIMPORT is different, by defining 
__attribute__((externally_visible)). This might have been relevant due 
to compile/link time symbol processing for that platform, but 
technically it should probably not have been connected to the platform 
per se, but rather to the compilation procedure. Since the arm-32 
platform is kind of abandoned right now, I propose to modify the 
compilation to be more standard, if this is required, rather than 
keeping these attributes.

/Magnus


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