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 ;-)

Last week was critical. Due to some problems with our Freifunk mesh network I was offline for some days. Well, not really offline. If I urgently needed Internet connection I had to take my girlfriend's laptop (mine is still unable to deal with ad-hoc mode), walk to the Traveplatz park and start the OLSR daemon. Still this does not really help updating the various SVN, Mercurial and Monotone repositories on my desktop computer. :-)

On the other hand I worked on the JIT Cache which is thanks to Twisti and Andreas Krall, now my diploma thesis topic. I wanted to fix the issues it had before LinuxTag and was successfull doing so: The JIT Cache is now working on ARM!

What massively helped me achieving this goal was the good old GNU Debugger. It cannot tell you when you forgot to flush the system's instruction and data caches (this was the final issue) but for everything else GDB was just great. Being an (x86) assembler addict in my young years I really enjoyed single stepping through JIT compiled code and watching the codegenerator emiting machine instructions.

I find it interesting to see how working on the Cacao virtual machine brings two of my otherwise quite unrelated interests together: Namely playing around with assembler stuff and working with a high-level programming language like Java. :-)

On related news: I committed MIDPath 0.3RC1 recipes to OpenEmbedded. These provide a fully configured and correctly set up installation of MIDPath. That means if your repo contains the binaries (I hope OpenMoko adopts those quickly) you just need to tell your package manager to install 'midpath' and that will install all of the mandatory packages and provides a suitable configuration (screen size, button mapping, GUI/sound provider, ...) that lets you start MIDlets right through MIDPath's SuiteManager.

Hint: Install 'midpath-demos' instead and you get everything from above plus a bunch of demo midlets to try out the platform.

MIDPath 0.3RC1 still has some rough edges but it is definitely maturing well. I hope that with the recipes more people will get to know about it.