Rodrigo Kumpera wrote:
Next time I'm going to implement something in line with jikesRVM`s vmmagic
(more like stealing the whole concept)
That's the idea! vmmagic has emerged from at least three separate
projects (OVM, JikesRVM and jnode). If you're interested in the whole
magic concept, there is discussion of it in the original Jalapeno papers
and here's a tech report written by OVM people a couple of years back:
http://www.ovmj.org/www_papers/idioms.ps
Perhaps we can start a new thread with [exec] to discuss execution
(interpretation and JIT). I think it would be great if people like you
were to discuss your experiences some more. We may need separate
[interp] and [jit] threads, but to start with there are a bunch of
questions about how the two ideas relate, how they interact, the various
pros and cons, so maybe we just start with the broader thread of [exec]
and maybe give a try with
self-hosting. Steve, do you have some pointers about how jikesRVM or OVM
does that?
In a nutshell, jikes rvm is first generation, it was the first to do
this. OVM came later, and from what I hear did a nicer job and
introduced greater flexibility. BTW, I'm not quite sure what you mean
by "self-hosting". One interpretation is that you only need Jikes RVM
to build Jikes RVM. That is currently not true because of some
relatively minor limitations in Jikes RVM. So we depend on a third
party VM to build (Sun, IBM, or kaffe).
Here are some of the original papers describing the java-in-java approach:
http://jikesrvm.sourceforge.net/info/pubs.shtml#oopsla99_jvm
http://jikesrvm.sourceforge.net/info/pubs.shtml#wcsss99
Note that JikesRVM has moved a fair way since then, however, the boot
image writing and the key java-in-java issues have not changed much at all.
I'd also suggest you take a look at the OVM sources:
http://www.ovmj.org/software.htm
With some luck some of the ovm'ers will chime in with something more
helpful.
--Steve
