2016/01/01

DISCLAIMER: These notes are from the defunct k8 project which precedes SquirrelJME. The notes for SquirrelJME start on 2016/02/26! The k8 project was effectively a Java SE 8 operating system and as such all of the notes are in the context of that scope. That project is no longer my goal as SquirrelJME is the spiritual successor to it.

00:47

Happy New Year!

00:49

Currently resetting up one of my laptops. I am going to install FreeBSD on it along with Java 8 so I have an additional way to test building my operating system and such. Right now I have only really worked with Windows (which I have yet to test with the refactored code) and Linux (which I currently use and it works). I am also switching to btrfs instead of ext4 on it. Hopefully I do not have the same experience I had 4 years ago when I used it. That experience being major filesystem corruption on a bad power off.

04:47

Caveats with plan. ZFS is not supported in FreeBSD for PowerPC systems and some software I used on Linux does not work with btrfs. The major thing with FreeBSD however is that I have to build everything from scratch. There is the ports.txz archive, however it contains all of the code just merged into an entire archive. So for example there are utilties, servers, games, and more combined all into one. So say if there is a port called foo, you would essentially have to extract the entire archive when you might not use all of it. For Foobarniux however, all packages can essentially be prebuilt. The sources and such are separate also. Thinking of that, it would be possible for hairball to support ZIP files containing source code. So thinking about it, I can write my own file manager which uses PackageContents instead of the file system. That would then mean that having the sources extracted to the disk would not be required at all. So this by itself would be very handy. The thing though is that there would essentially be a source directory and a source extraction so to speak. I could see a point where one is trying to build Foobarniux and they have extra source ZIP files perhaps for say 8-bit Z80 CPUs. Hairball would have to choose which one to install for example.

04:54

On the FreeBSD system, I hope the OpenJDK in the ports is old enough because otherwise I would not be able to use JamVM due to incompatible changes made in more recent versions.

openjdk version "1.8.0_40-internal"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_40-internal-b04)
JamVM (build 2.0.0, inline-threaded interpreter with stack-caching)

My release is quite old but it is supported, which is why I use it.

05:02

Also using the file managers, I can completely remove the need for temporary files, even though it will use up memory rather than disk space. So for memory constrained systems (perhaps say the N64 or Dreamcast) building might be troublesome. I could also have a system property and a basic check for the amount of free memory the JVM has. The intermediary files could also even be compressed with GZip in memory.

05:09

Definitely must get used to the new year, was typing out 2015/12....

05:17

Also, a purely in memory system would be agnostic to the disk and how files are stored on it. Foobarniux might be being built on DOS or similar.

11:59

The OpenJDK in ports is from March 3, 2014. This is 15 days before the first release, so it is quite old. However despite it being that old it will work because it does not change the VM stuff. Plus Foobarniux should be able to be built by any Java 8 version of the JDK.

12:26

JamVM would be far superior to the very slow but precise Zero VM.