JamVM no claim to notability?

JamVM has a wikipedia page. I didn't create it, and I'm not egotistical enough to maintain it in any way. However, I was less than impressed to see that somebody had taken it upon themselves to put the page forward for deletion. The reasons being that it hasn't had a recent release, and that it has no claim to notability.

I have tried to show that neither of these claims are true. For example, JamVM is the default VM on Ubuntu/ARM 11.10. I think this is both notable and recent! However, this doesn't seem to count, the debate being fixated on a claim on the page regarding Dalvik from a blog.

To be honest, I'm so disgusted with the process that I no longer care if the page is deleted. But if anybody else cares, please put a word in for JamVM.

OpenJDK/JamVM Git repository

JamVM's got a shiny new Git repository, which contains the port to the OpenJDK class-library. Details are here: http://developer.berlios.de/git/?group_id=6545

The repository can be checked out anonymously with:

git clone git://git.berlios.de/jamvm

JamVM 1.6.0 will be released off of this in the near future. JamVM 1.6.0 will be a combined release, supporting both GNU Classpath and OpenJDK class-libraries, with GNU Classpath support being built by default. I still need to run some tests to make sure that the refactored codebase hasn't introduced any regressions w.r.t. GNU Classpath and JamVM 1.5.4.

So what can be done with the OpenJDK port? As discussed in my FOSDEM talk, it is ready for a first release. There's stuff which hasn't been implemented, but it runs everything I've tested it with (jedit, eclipse, derby, etc.).

Some words on running the port. JamVM is not yet integrated into the IcedTea build process (although it supports the same --with-java-runtime-library switch as Cacao). Instead, the easiest way to test the port is to build JamVM, and copy the libjvm.so file into an existing IcedTea/OpenJDK installation.

After cloning the git repository, do:

./autogen.sh --with-java-runtime-library=openjdk

This will generate the autoconf/automake files and configure JamVM to build support for OpenJDK.

Then do make, make install as usual. This will put libjvm.so into /usr/local/jamvm/lib.

This can then be copied onto an existing IcedTea installation (or a copy of one), e.g. on x86_64 (as root):

cd /usr/lib/jvm
cp -r java-6-openjdk jamvm-openjdk
cp /usr/local/jamvm/lib/libjvm.so jamvm-openjdk/jre/lib/amd64/server

You can then run it by running the normal java wrapper, e.g.:

/usr/lib/jvm/jamvm-openjdk/jre/bin/java -version

java version "1.6.0_20"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.9.5) (6b20-1.9.5-0ubuntu1)
JamVM (build 1.6.0-devel, inline-threaded interpreter)

(the inline-threaded interpreter is the other name for the code-copying JIT)