This was a big pile of work but now it is a nice achievement for Jalimo: The most complicated issues have been sorted out and we can now build Sun's PhoneME Advanced (Foundation profile) with the JIT compiler enabled for all our little ARM devices (And not only we can do this but everyone because the recipes are in the repository).
The first device for which I could build the runtime was the BeagleBoard. You can see the full log of the first bits of CVM-goodness on that device here. What is important to note is that the JIT compiler is enabled:
CVM_JIT=true
When compiling the source with the JIT the build gets a bit more complicated: Some Java programs will be compiled and run on certain sources. What is nice that these helper programs actually run on a GNU Classpath-powered VM. See, this code is still does usefull things for us. :-)
Buglabs recently did a comparison of Cacao, JamVM and PhoneME Advanced (interpreted only) on ARM systems. Surprisingly (or not :-) ) JamVM does a very good job!
While we are at it: JamVM seems to be the only (free!) Java virtual machine that can run on the AVR32 architecture. The port is not yet included in the upstream repository but is nevertheless quite interesting: The guys doing the port are making use of the Java hardware acceleration (whose specification can be obtained freely).
Finally the other day I wrote down everything about the Java support in OpenEmbedded to the shiny new OE wiki. I hope that with this information people will quickly be able to customize their OE-based distribution. Furthermore the pages describe the quite complex bootstrap process and each of the packages that belongs to it.
Next stop: OpenJDK ;-)