Re: [Sablevm-developer] Porting SableVM to ARM: Questions

[Etienne M. G. <eti...@uq...>]

On Wed, Dec 04, 2002 at 04:29:26PM -0700, Gunda Domlur wrote:
> Thanks for all the advice you guys gave me. I finally got everything 
> compiled and ready to go.


Super!

> When I ran the Hello World program, unfortunately sablevm failed. Here is 
> the invocation I did
> 
> sablevm -vsgj -c "/usr/local/lib/sablevm/classes-1.0.5" Hello.class
> 
> The relevant output I got was
> 
> [verbose jni: JNI_CreateJavaVM]
> [verbose gc: allocating initial heap (16777216 bytes)]
> [verbose class: loading "java/lang/Object"]
> sablevm: cannot create vm


Have you correctly compiled and installed all of sablevm,
sablevm-native-library, sablevm-class-library?  SableVM seems not to
find "java.lang.Object" while bootstrapping.

Also, why are you specifying: -c "/usr/local/lib/sablevm/classes-1.0.5" ?

> PS: Etienne: When you said "The fun part (let say not before January) will 
> be to make the inline-threaded engine functional on ARM" what did you mean 
> ? Is there something that will prevent it from working on ARM ?


Getting inline-threading to work on a specific platform requires
(a) understanding how its caches behave (including data AND instruction
caches).  It also involves (b) testing the various bytecode
implementations for "inlinability".

The (a) part requires finding the relevant information, and clearly
understanding it.  The (b) part will require some minor rethinking of
how the "inlinability" is encoded in SableVM, so that it becomes easy
to manage this property on an architecture/compiler basis, ideally in
independent files, one per platform.

So, yes this will be fun (at least for me), as I will learn a lot
about all these exotic systems!  [I do not have any idea what the ARM
architecture is!]

The main difficulty is that to be more productive, I will need to
have access to such systems.  I hear that becoming an official Debian
developer to gain access to various systems (of different
architectures) requires many months.  I will have trouble to be
effective without access to such systems to make tests...

Of course, ideally contributors (with access to such systems) should
be in charge, but it's always fun to land a hand when you're the main
system designer, and people need help...

Etienne
-- 
Etienne M. Gagnon                    http://www.info.uqam.ca/~egagnon/
SableVM:                                       http://www.sablevm.org/
SableCC:                                       http://www.sablecc.org/