Mark J. Wielaard

The CACAO Team did it again!

CACAO 0.98 “Free all JITs!” released.

This is a major feature enhancement and bug-fix release. Here is a short list of the most important changes:

• ARM and MIPS32 code generators are now open-source.
• PowerPC64 code generator was added.
• Sun’s phoneme CLDC-1.1 classes can now be used as Java core library.
• Exception throwing code was completely rewritten, this saves JIT code size from 20% up to 50%.
• Lock-record code was rewritten and a memory leak was fixed.
• Threads code has been reworked and improved.
• Exception code has been reworked and improved.
• Implemented Class/Method/Field getSignature.
• A lot of stuff has been reworked, fixed or improved in the whole VM code.
• Fixed memory leak in threads code.

Starting with this release, CACAO can also use Sun’s phoneme CLDC-1.1 classes as Java core library. You can build a CLDC CACAO with or without JNI support (–disable-jni).

CACAO uses GNU Classpath as default Java core library and supports upstream releases or CVS snapshots. This release supports GNU Classpath 0.92 or higher and was tested on some platforms against GNU Classpath 0.95.

Currently supported JIT compiler architectures are:

• alpha-unknown-freebsd5.4
• alpha-unknown-linux-gnu
• arm-unknown-linux-gnu
• i386-apple-darwin8.8.1
• i386-unknown-freebsd5.3
• i686-pc-linux-gnu
• mips-sgi-irix6.5
• mips-unknown-linux-gnu
• powerpc-apple-darwin7.2.0
• powerpc-unknown-linux-gnu
• powerpc64-unknown-linux-gnu
• x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu

Information about working applications and some screenshots can be found on http://www.cacaojvm.org/

Fun stuff to play with this weekend:

Fedora 7

Fully free 1.5 java programming language stack:

$ gcj --version
gcj (GCC) 4.1.1 20070105 (Red Hat 4.1.1-51)
Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

GPLv3 final draft

Changes in this draft include:

• GPLv3 is now compatible with version 2.0 of the Apache License.
• Distributors who make discriminatory patent deals after March 28 may not convey software under GPLv3. Novell is not prohibited from distributing this software because the patent protection they arranged with Microsoft last November can be turned against Microsoft to the community’s benefit.
• Terms have been added clarifying how you can contract for private modification of free software, or for a data center to run it for you.
• A reference to a US consumer protection statute has been replaced by explicit criteria, for greater clarity outside the US.

GNU Emacs 22

Emacs version 22 includes GTK+ toolkit support, enhanced mouse support, a new keyboard macro system, improved Unicode support, and drag-and-drop operation on X, plus many new modes and packages including a graphical user interface to GDB, Python mode, the mathematical tool Calc, the remote file editing system Tramp, and more.

Somehow I had missed JaLiMo (shame on me, it is sponsored by Tarent and Robert Schuster is also working on it) which provides free java stacks for maemo and openmoko, based on Cacao, JamVM, GNU Classpath, java-gnome and MIDPath. They will give a talk at LinuxTag titled Java-Linux-Mobile Platform. Wish I could go. Or better, wish I actually had a N800 or Neo1973 to play with this all.

In related news, Christian got Cacao and GNU Classpath in releasable state on arm as shown by running Eclipse on an armv5l (screenshot). Not sure how usable eclipse is on a n880 or Neo1973 screen, but very cool.

Eben Moglen spoke at the Red Hat Summit last week.

Imagine a party who engages in recurrent threats every summer time for years on end. On a sort of annual Be Very Afraid tour. I know it sounds absurd. Imagine now that what happens is that the annual Be Very Afraid tour starts creating terrible pushback…

Listen to the ogg/theora version – 5 minutes long.

Update: Full text of The “Be very afraid” tour now on wikisource.

That was one fun week! It was so great to meet Dalibor Topic, Casey Marshall, David Daney, Tom Tromey and Tom Fitzsimmons who feel like old friends even though we really only meet and work together virtually.

OpenJDK is now in full swing and Sun put up a great show at JavaOne. We were all a little embarrassed by the fact that the people not “trapped” at JavaOne seemed to have the most fun with the code (and of course Tom Fitzsimmons, who was at JavaOne with us but just seems unstoppable). Great work people! Tom Marble made sure that John Cage did a little shout out to all those hacking and having fun during the keynote introductions. And please go a little easy on the Sun OpenJDK engineers. They got the message loud and clear – you are really enthusiastic and want more tests to make sure that what you contribute is of impeccable quality – they are scrambling to give you all the tools and scale to match your enthusiasm.

There is a news article about one of the libre java sessions we had (with a somewhat dramatic title, which always seems to happen when you allow journalists to attend sessions that are really meant to be for hackers just talking together, but capturing some of the real discussions going on). There were multiple sessions like that and a lot of insights into what makes an community. In the end it all resolves around trust and having the feeling that you can work together without loosing your own identity.

And Sun went out of their way to be open and transparent, while listening to all the voices of the different communities. They had made sure there was plenty of outside input. Personal highlights were some of discussions between and with people like Peter Brown (FSF), Cliff Schmidt (ASF) and Eben Moglen (FSLC) on communities, working together, learning from the past and doing better in the future. Because the libre java community deserves a great united community where everybody has the freedom to be a little different.

There are too many Sun people to thank for last week, but Bruno Souza, Tom Marble, Rich Sands, Onno Kluyt, Mark Reinhold, David Herron and Simon Phipps deserve special thanks for taking a lot of time out of their very busy schedule during JavaOne to make us feel at home, introduce us to numerous interesting people, getting us into parties and offering more free beer than any of us could drink. With people like these as guardian angles libre Java, and the openjdk project in particular, has a very bright future.

On top of all that I had a really good time together with Petri touring the state of the Beach Boys, Zorro and Schwarzenegger, visiting the most amazing national park (Yosemite), meeting up with my pals Vincent and Erwin (who took us to a fascinating concert by Junior Brown) and finally meeting one of my Red Hat colleagues and uberhacker Roland McGrath to discuss all things Frysk. Completely exhausted, but very happy.

I am at JavaOne now where the OpenJDK source drop was announced and Dalibor got onto the governance board. It is a madhouse here. Lots of fun. Congrats to all the Sun people for making all this happen. Hope we will be able to clear the last encumberments really quick.

Noteworthy changes are:

• The Java compatible environment in main (gij/gcj) was updated to provide
  Java 1.5 compatibility, allowing now packages in main, which require 1.5
  compatibility and can be built using gcj.

Nice job Matthias!

Getting package source and debug info isn’t always as transparent on Fedora as I would like. But there is yum-utils that provides yumdownloader which can get packages given that you know the source package name (is there an easy way to find that out/automate that?).

yumdownloader --enablerepo=core-source --source gcc

(don’t forget that you have to enable the correct source repo for the package, also don’t know whether that can be automated)
Now Seth Vidal wrote debuginfo-install to get the debug packages (and dependencies) for a package. Now if we could automate all these things in such a way that you automagically get all relevant debug-info and optionally the sources downloaded and installed from Frysk when inspecting a package that would be really cool.

Jim Huang did it! On the same day we released GNU Classpath 0.95 he got it working with Cacao on the OpenMoko to give it a free java stack. Go Jim!

OpenMoko and OLPC are really exciting developments. Finally fully open hardware combined with Free Software to make them do precisely what you want. World dominitation here we come! :)

This release adds some serious jazz:

Full merge of 1.5 generics work. Bootstrappable with OpenJDK javac compiler. URLConnection timeout support. TimeZone can use platform zoneinfo file when available. The Collection classes, lang.management and util.spi have been updated to 1.6. Addition of 1.6 ServiceLoader. Speedup for cairo and freetype Graphics2D support. The ASM library is now included. Better detection of browser plugin mechanisms for gcjwebplugin applet support in mozilla, iceweasel and firefox.

See also the full announcement and some nice screenshots.