So, Betelgeuse blogged about the new partly-free JDK released by Sun Microsystems. Kudos to them for actually starting to fix the Java Trap. Hopefully in the next months we’ll finally see Java taking the place it was designed for in development of platform-agnostic software, and applets in web pages, with the (hoped) availability of it on more platform that are available right now.
Of course I want to get OpenJDK working on Gentoo/FreeBSD as soon as possible, as the FreeBSD Foundation’s “Diablo” project seems to be stale and broken (latest version is 1.5.0-7, I’m not even sure if it’s vulnerable, as I remember some security advisories for sun-jdk for Linux), and I wanted to move to Tomcat for my blog. So I asked Betelgeuse a bit of information about openjdk and downloaded the Java Experimental overlay, and decided to merge openjdk on Linux first.
To get it to work on Gentoo/FreeBSD the first thing is to get the Linux emulation support at least partly working, as a JDK 1.7 is needed as a seed to build OpenJDK (this reminds me a lot of GHC unfortunately). So I’ll work on it until I can get OpenJDK building here.
Unfortunately I can’t build openjdk yet, the build fails with an “Argument list too long” error in an execve() call. I’m not sure what causes it, but I hope to investigate it further in the near future (maybe I should ask Betelgeuse tomorrow after his exam).
Another problem I’ve found with OpenJDK is that the build of hotspot mixes the values of CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS, throwing a lot of warnings about -Wno-pointer-sign and -Wno-format-zero-length that I have in CFLAGS and are not supported by GNU C++ building. I’ve tried fixing this one but I was unable to find the perfect patch to fix it, so I reported the bug with the tentative patch to Sun, hopefully they know their build system better than I do 🙂
When I’m able to get OpenJDK building on Linux, and I understand the process well enough to work on it, then I’ll try to do my best so that OpenJDK works on Gentoo/FreeBSD at the best I can. I’m sure there are people from FreeBSD project working on it too, they did this already to get Diablo out, after all, but most of them don’t blog so you can’t really know what they are up to (beside if they are the same who would be releasing the new Diablos, they are probably missing in action for months now).
Who knows, maybe we’ll be able to get OpenJDK working on Gentoo/FreeBSD/SPARC64 too, that would be neat 🙂 After all, FreeBSD and Solaris aren’t that much different (as the DTrace and the ZFS ports shows) and SPARC64 is supported by Sun for sure 😉
