What would it take to make Hotspot forkable? Obviously we'd need to pause all VM threads and restarting them on the other side (or perhaps a prefork mode that doesn't spin up threads?) but I know there's challenges with signal handlers etc.
I ask for a few reasons... * Dalvik has shown what you can do with a "larval" preforking setup. This is a big reason why Android apps can run in such a small amount of memory and start up so quickly. * Startup time! If we could fork an already-hot JVM, we could hit the ground running with *every* command, *and* still have truly separate processes. * There's a lot of development and scaling patterns that depend on forking, and we get constant questions about forking on JRuby. * Rubinius -- a Ruby VM with partially-concurrent GC, a signal-handling thread, JIT threads, and real parallel Ruby threads -- supports forking. They bring the threads to a safe point, fork, and restart them on the other side. Color me jealous. So...given that OpenJDK is rapidly expanding into smaller-profile devices and new languages and development patterns, perhaps it's time to make it fit into the UNIX philosophy. Where do we start? - Charlie _______________________________________________ mlvm-dev mailing list mlvm-dev@openjdk.java.net http://mail.openjdk.java.net/mailman/listinfo/mlvm-dev
