Whoo, boy!  There's quite a thread on the Blackdown java-linux about
this very issue (check the archives at the Blackdown site), as the
Blackdown team feels dissed by Sun for not mentioning them in initial
press releases.  From what I heard, it was a big SNAFU by the Sun public
relations department. 

Sun is (belatedly) trying to make amends with a public apology today
(http://java.sun.com/features/1999/12/linux.html).

To answer your question, the Inprise people took Blackdown's 1.2.1
porting effort and put a group of engineers on it full-time to make the
port "commercial quality".  So the Sun/Inprise release is different from
the latest Blackdown releases (RC2 & 3), as they progressed
independently after Blackdown's 1.2.1 release (I believe that was
pre-release 2).  

In particular:
- The Sun/Inprise release is green-threads only.
- The JIT is the JIT created by Inprise several months ago.  It is
arguably the fastest JIT for Linux these days.
- Inprise did a lot of optimization in Motif/AWT/Swing and green
threads, so it is quite fast compared to Blackdown running Swing apps on
green threads.

- The latest Blackdown releases have much improved native threads
support, based on improvements in glibc 2.1.2, and hence requires this
latest glibc version.
- The Blackdown comes with Sun's JIT, which still has some issues (what
software doesn't have issues, I can hear you asking! :).
- I believe the Blackdown port contains some fixes "back-ported" from
1.3.
- There are also some other networking fixes in the Blackdown port that
aren't in the Sun/Inprise (I'm appending a mail with some info on this,
from the maintainer of this Java performance site:
http://www.volano.com/report.html)


-Adam Ambrose


Eric Raymond wrote:

> What's the difference between the Blackdown port and the Sun/Inprise
> port.  Did they just take the blackdown port and re-release it?  (The
> Sun readme file is a blackdown readme).
> 
> This is a little bit off the intended purpose of the list but I'm sure
> this is of interest to many of us....  Please flame directly to me if
> this is innapropriate.


I opened what I think is the last bug holding back the VolanoMark
network scalability tests under Blackdown JDK 1.2.2:

  Bug Id 1604, "Segmentation violation with 1020 timeout sockets"
  http://www.blackdown.org/cgi-bin/jdk/incoming?id=1604

I guess we report these bugs to Sun and Inprise through this page?

  http://java.sun.com/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi

Sun and Inprise need to fix both Blackdown Bug Id 1604 and 1578 for me
to run the VolanoMark network test with their JDK 1.2.2:

  http://www.blackdown.org/cgi-bin/jdk/incoming?expression=neffenger

John Neffenger


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