The intended audience of this newsletter is the Kaffe development community, and people who want to follow Kaffe development, but perhaps don't have enough time to track the mailing list. Also, I think it will be a handy organizational tool for myself.
This is my first attempt at this, so I'm interested in feedback.
Dalibor checked in a patch to fix a hardcoded filesystem lookup for the java.security configuration file that I missed when I moved things to the JRE file layout. I imagine this affects 1.0.7 as well.
OpenBSD compile problem
JAR Manifest possible bug
Bogus jthread assertion?
Win32 assertion "!INTS_DISABLED()" failed errors
Note: I've got a lot more bugs saved in my email folders - it will take me some time to write them all up and organize them.
I'm sure I'm missing a lot of people. Tell me what you're doing, and I'll add you to the list!
Some recent items:
I've been a bit slow posting this. Naveed Ahmad has started writing some documentation on the architecture of Kaffe, which looks like it could be quite helpful to anybody trying to learn the code.
Mike Chen has put online the paper he presented at the JVM 2002 conference entitled "Targeting Dynamic Compilation for Embedded Systems", which is a new JIT which he implemented on Transvirtual's internal version of Kaffe (which was released under the GPL as part of PocketLinux). It's definitely worth a read, especially if you are into compilers. I'd love to see "jit4" integrated into a future release of Kaffe.
Of course, if you haven't read Godmar Back's thesis on KaffeOS, you should. There are some earlier papers here.
(I really need to reorganize the website so I have a good place to post these permanently)
Here are some other really good bits of documentation I'd like to pull in:
Dalibor sent me a nice website patch incorporating japitools output - I want to go through the process of recreating the output myself before I incorporate it into the website.
Another nice thing that Dalibor suggested I do is to incorporate the Mauve test results into the website somewhere.
A lot of the pages are in a semi- or non-finished state (eg. Credits, Compatibility, Performance), or need redesigning (Documentation, Ports, Projects). People have sent me a variety of links and screen shots that need to be added as well.
The server is still sitting on at it's temporary location (on a DSL line). The line is pretty slow, but at least the hardware does seem fairly stable. I need to get in touch with my contact at communitycolo.net to plan the logistics of physically moving the server to it's new, permanent home.
Aug 24 - SableVM 1.0.4 Released - (Announcement)
Aug 19 - Kissme 0.0.26 Released - (Announcement) - Also, Etienne proposed merging Kissme with SableVM, and here is John's response (he seems receptive to the idea). And a day later, John announces that he's got a working PowerPC port!
Aug 16 - GCJ - Andrew Haley updated the gcc tree-based inliner to work for gcj (Initial RFC, Commit #1, Commit #2).
Aug 14 - GCC 3.2 Released (includes gcj) - (Changes)
Aug 14 - SableVM 1.0.2 Released - (Announcement) - Grzegorz Prokopski contributed an Alpha port
Aug 14 - Wonka 0.9.3 Released - (Announcement) - with a new, faster interpreter and some AWT improvements.
Aug 8 - SableVM 1.0.1 Released - (Announcement)
Aug 6 - SableVM 1.0.0 Released - (Announcement) - Wow, it hits 1.0.0! Good work Etienne!
Aug 1 - JanosVM 0.8.0 Released - (Announcement) - includes a new user level thread
system that supports stride scheduling, optimized packet handling when
using moab, a port of xprofiling to the nodeos/oskit, a resync with
kaffe v1.0.7, an experimental java wrapper for the lmsensors library,
an alpha version of the PowerPC jit3 back end for Mac OS X (darwin), a
test suite for basic jitter operation, and the usual bug fixes.
July 20 - Jikes RVM + Classpath - John Leuner managed to get Classpath to work on Jikes RVM
Kaffe Weekly News is edited by Jim Pick.
Do you have anything you'd like to see in next week's newsletter? Send them in to me a weeklynews@kaffe.org
For more information on Kaffe, see http://www.kaffe.org/
Greg Wooledge reported an OpenBSD compile bug and a solution involving manually creating a symlink.
Based on his description of the problem, it appears that the problem may be that Kaffe is not following the major number/minor number library versioning scheme, and is instead using three part version numbers (based on the Kaffe release version number). Arne Woerner proposed a libtool modification - but I'm not sure if that's the right way to fix it. Eventually, I do want to see the vm component modularized to the point that it could be distributed separately as a library that solely implements the JNI invocation interface - so it probably makes sense to use a versioning scheme along the lines of what libtool recommends (eg. not use the -release flag in the Makefile.am's).
Gianandrea Gobbo reports that kaffe can't access the manifest in Jar files. This needs to be looked at it - it might possibly be a bug.
Greg Wooledge reported that he had a kaffe 1.0.7 process that died after a few days with an assertion. Godmar thinks the assertion is probably unnecessary and suggests an alternative fix. Sounds like another bug.
Muthuswamy R reports on the "make check" errors he gets on Win32. I was getting these too, the last time I checked. I think the Win32 port just needs a lot or work at this point. This should definitely be listed as a bug (if it isn't already). We could really use a volunteer to fix/clean up the Win32 port.
Cygwin compile problem
Daniel Kasmeroglu reported a Cygwin compile problem. It's probably a bug. On my cygwin install, it compiles, but my install might differ a bit from the norm. I'm going to add this as a bug.
Bad fcntl test / gcc local include warning compile bug
Vesa Kaihlavirta reports a strange compile problem he's experiencing. Gwenole Beauchesne recognized the problem and suggests a workaround - it's got something to do with gcc warnings tricking the configure script. I need to look at it closer to see what the appropriate fix is, since I don't understand the issue completely, so I'll add it as a bug.
Patch Queue
This is the list of posted patches that should go in, but haven't yet, either because they need more work, or I just haven't had the time to look at them yet.
I've got go back through several months of my mailing list archives searching for uncommitted patches. Feel free to point out any patches I don't appear to be taking action on, and I'll add them to the list. I've probably just lost them or have procrastinated for too long.New Bugs
The following bugs need to be "swept" into FAQ.Known-Bugs:
Resolved Bugs
The following bugs need to be removed from FAQ.Known-Bugs:
None.
Ongoing Work and Sightings
This is a little section where I'm going to spotlight some of the ongoing work. Please tell me what you're up to, and I'll list it here.
Documentation News
One of my shorter-term goals for Kaffe is to improve the state of the documentation. There is already a fair amount of documentation scattered around in various places. I'd like to collect it all together in one place.
Website / Server News
I've been very busy in the past few weeks with my personal life. Since Transvirtual folded, I've been trying to find a new full-time job, and I'm doing some part-time contract work. So due to time pressures, I've let quite a backlog of website-related tasks built up. I'll try to clear up as much of that backlog as possible in the next week.Other Java and Virtual Machine News
There are a lot of interesting developments going on in the free software and virtual machine space. I'd like to highlight some of them here: