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KAFFE OpenVM 1.0 Beta 1
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Notes for the port on NetWinder
by Raffaele Sena (raff@aromatic.com)

Created:     7/17/1998
Last update: 7/19/1998

- the configuration specific files ( config/arm/linux )
  are derived partly from the arm/netbsd port and part from other
  linux ports (not that there is too much in them)

- right now a statically linked virtual machine is generated.
  you can build a dynamically linked one by commenting out
  the 'dynamic_libraries=no' line in config/arm/linux/config.frag
  (but it seems to have some problems)

  also, the standard configuration installs the kaffe-related libraries
  in /usr/local/lib instead of /usr/local/share/kaffe (and I don't like it :)

- also, the virtual machine is now built to use the interpreter, not the
  jit. Unfortunately, the interpreter does not seems to be supported as
  well as the jit. I found a major (and quite stupid) problem on a
  conversion from (Java) int to (Java) char, returning only the lower 8-bits
  of the integer instead of 16 (Java char ARE 2 bytes long). This was 
  breaking the pizza compiler and so, basically, any possible testing.

- there are a couple of specific changes made for this port (related to
  the stack for threads) and they are marked as 

		#if defined(arm) && defined(linux)
  
  or just '#ifdef linux' if in the config/arm directory.
  I'm not sure what is the best way to specify arm/linux on NetWinder
  (if needed)

- there are some changes not specifically related to the NetWinder port,
  but to static link (some native methods were not exported and there was
  a bug in the Java runtime not correctly managing the fact that there
  were no libraries to load).

- If you want to experiment with the internal classes, keep a copy of 
  the original Klasses.jar somewhere, so that you can restore a working 
  environment if the newly generated does not work.

- threads : the original 1.0b1 only had support for unix-jthead
  (a simple thread mechanism using setjmp/longjmp), so I configure
  arm/linux to don't use unix-internal (while arm/netbsd1 is doing
  the opposite). There are now sources for unix-internal too, so
  I will try it out.

- the sources for the pizza compiler are available at:

	http://www.cis.unisa.edu.au/~pizza/

  they don't come with much documentation on how to build them.
  just build all of them, in their own directories and create
  a new pizza.jar with something like "zip -r pizza.jar pizza"

- The default configuration should be fine for NetWinder.
  The only extra libraries needed are X11 and jpeg6a.
  If you jpeg library is not in the standard path (i.e. /usr/lib
  or /usr/local/lib) try something like:
	
	sh configure "--x-libraries=/usr/X11/lib -L/mylibrarydir"
  
- As today (7/19) the current status is that I can build a virtual
  machines and run the regression tests. The compiler now works.

  All the tests passes, but I had to do a hack in the jthread
  sleep mechanism to make the timer working. For some reason
  when the application is going to do a suspensive select
  (assuming it will be waken up by a SIGALRM signal), the
  interrupt handler is not installed anymore and the system
  call does not get interrupted. Re-installing the handler
  makes things working.

- AWT: it does something - the simple tests in test/awt run.
       but it seems to be a major problem with displayed strings
       that are one character shorter than they should.

I guess that's all for now. I'll try to keep this file updated.

If you have further question, drop me a note at raff@aromatic.com

Enjoy,
	Raffaele Sena