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

[Gunda D. <sab...@ho...>]

>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.

I think so. I will check again. I had to do one thing out of the ordinary 
though. Jikes did not compile on our system (arm/linux), mostly because we 
don't a working C++ compiler :-( The sablevm-class library was built on a 
P4/Linux machine and then the whole /usr/local/lib/sablevm/classes-1.0.5 
contents were ftp'ed to the arm/linux system to the same path. This step 
shouldn't affect anything I think. Let me know if I got anything wrong.

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

I thought this was the way to tell the sablevm the class path. How does the 
vm know where to look for the class libraries ? Is it thru an environment 
variable ? After compiling and installing according to your scripts is there 
anything else I need to set ?

>
> > 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.

OK I can help with part (a).

I don't fully understand part (b). After I get the basic interpreter going I 
intend to work on the inlining part too. I will bug you again on that. 
Meanwhile if you can elaborate on the "inlinability" that would get me 
started thinking ...

>
>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...

Hmm.. let me think about this for a while.

Thanks.
-Gunda



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