Tuesday 12 May 2009

Netifera uses JamVM as remote probe

Netifera is a very interesting 100% Java-based Open Source network security platform. The next version will include a probe, which is a "deployable software agent that makes it possible to run all netifera platform tools remotely".

The probe uses JamVM and a cut-down version of GNU Classpath. This is downloaded onto the remote site to run the netifera tools. My thanks to Claudio Castiglia (of Netifera) for sending me the following link to a webcast showing the probe in action:

http://netifera.com/video/netifera_java_virtual_machine_as_shellcode


JamVM and GNU Classpath are mentioned starting 14:54 into the webcast in the discussion of the probe architecture.

Monday 11 May 2009

JamVM on Beagle Board

I've been intending to get a Beagle Board for quite a while now, to replace a Neo1973 as the development platform for JamVM on ARM. The Neo has an ARM920T core, and I've been particularly wanting to test JamVMs code-copying JIT on a more modern implementation (the Beagle Board has a Cortex A8). But I've been waiting for the Rev C board, as this has working EHCI USB host, and 256MB RAM (previous revisions had 128MB). The board arrived 2 weeks ago, but I haven't had much time to set it up until now...

So far, the results are quite encouraging. SciMark 2.0 shows a 55% speed improvement:



While jBYTEmark shows an 82% improvement on Integer tests:



The option -Xcodestats prints out the size of the JIT code-cache when the VM exits. This shows 77K was used after running SciMark 2.0, and 178K after jBYTEmark. This is using the code-profiling introduced in JamVM 1.5.2.