Jikes RVM version 3.1.1 has been released and is available for download at http://downloads.sourceforge.net/jikesrvm/jikesrvm-3.1.1.tar.bz2

Details are given below, or are browsable online in our JIRA instance at http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/RVM/fixforversion/14900.

Three students will be working on Jikes RVM as part of the 2010 Google Summer of Code. They are:

1. Laurence Hellyer, University of Kent, On-the-fly copying GC. Mentors: Eliot Moss, Daniel Frampton and Richard Jones.

1. Michael Gendelman, Tel Aviv University, Implementing the Compressor. Mentors: Steve Blackburn and Richard Jones

1. Ashwani Rao, University of Delaware, Improved Register Allocator for x86 and x86_64. Mentors: Tony Hosking, John Cavazos and Eliot Moss.

Laurence, Michael, Ashwani: welcome to the team. We are all looking forward to working with you and seeing the end product of your efforts.

The JikesRVM GSoC page is here. The GSoC timeline is here.

I am very pleased to announce that Jikes RVM has been accepted for the 2010 Summer of Code. GSoC allows students to work closely with a mentor on a project of interest to Jikes RVM between 24 May and 20 August. Google will pay a stipend of $5000 to each accepted student developer. In the past, good things have come out of the GSoC and students have enjoyed the programme. You can find more details of the programme at gsoc2010.

Our project suggestions and associated mentors are listed on our Jikes RVM proposals page

If you are interested in participating in the GSoC, please start talking to a mentor now. The formal application period is 29 March - 9 April (both at 12 noon PDT / 19:00 UTC). The complete timeline for the programme is here.

I'd be grateful if you could circulate this announcement to any student you think might be interested in making a contribution to Jikes RVM.

Richard

We are hoping to participate in the Google Summer of Code 2010. We have had some really excellent contributions to JikesRVM come out of previous Summers of Code so please take the time to visit our Google Summer of Code 2010 pages and possibly add some project proposals.

The organization application deadline is March 12.

Dear Jikes RVM Researchers,

We are writing to introduce two new members to the Jikes RVM Steering Committee, announce some changes to the project organization, and highlight our performance results, which are now competitive with the products on the DaCapo Benchmarks.

Jikes RVM version 3.1.0 has been released and is available for download at http://downloads.sourceforge.net/jikesrvm/jikesrvm-3.1.0.tar.bz2

It's been almost nine months since the release of Jikes RVM 3.0.1, and quite a bit has changed in Jikes RVM. We'd like to call out several items that may be of particular interest to the community.

1. Jikes RVM has switched to using native threading instead of m-to-n (aka green) threading.
2. The default mature space collector has changed from Mark-Sweep to Immix.
3. Jikes RVM is now licensed under the Eclipse Public License (EPL).
4. The 3.1 release significantly improves over the performance of 3.0.1, with speedups of 10% and 21% on average for DaCapo and SPEC benchmarks respectively on an Intel C2Q. Highlights include a 29% improvement in jbb and a 32% improvement in jython.

Details are given below, or are browsable online in our JIRA instance at http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/RVM/fixforversion/14620.

Please vote in the online poll: http://www.doodle.com/qtb3sm9k42wbxs9q

Polling will be open until March 19, 2009.

O'Reilly have released a new book called Beautiful Architecture. Ian Rogers and Dave Grove have written a chapter entitled The Strength of Metacircular Virtual Machines: Jikes RVM intended to serve as an overview and initial reference to the design of Jikes RVM. Proceeds from the book go to Médecins Sans Frontières.

To celebrate the double milestones of this being the 10th year of Jikes RVM development and the release of Jikes RVM 3 , we've decided to create t-shirts to reward Jikes RVM contributors. Whilst meta-circular virtual machine development in Java may result in beautiful code it might not be a true indicator of other artistic ability. We've therefore decided to have a competition for people to put forward their design of what should be on our t-shirts. We have cash to ensure the production of the t-shirts from the mentor payments of this years Jikes RVM Google Summer-of-Code (thanks Google and the mentors!). The deadline for submissions to the competition is January 1st 2009. Remember to keep contributing so that you will be inline to receive free Jikes RVM booty! For more information on the competition please use the jikesrvm-researchers mailing list.

Jikes RVM version 3.0.1 has been released and is available for download at http://downloads.sourceforge.net/jikesrvm/jikesrvm-3.0.1.tar.bz2

The detailed release notes for major changes since 3.0.0 can be found below or in JIRA ( http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/RVM/fixforversion/14378);

** New Feature

* [RVM-507] - Initial prototype of TuningFork trace generation in Jikes RVM

* [RVM-515] - Make boot image writer traversal of object graph configurable

* [RVM-517] - Reflection optimization

* [RVM-528] - Support for eclipse-project with Harmony class libraries

* [RVM-634] - Add RuntimePure annotation to indicate when a Pure annotation should only be respected at runtime

* [RVM-673] - Implement Inline.When.AssertionsDisabled pragma

** Improvement

* [RVM-291] - Immortal objects with address based hashing should set their hashed bit during boot image writing

* [RVM-443] - Avoid back references in java.lang.reflect VMXXX classes

* [RVM-476] - Make lock allocation thread-model-agnostic.

* [RVM-627] - Use java.nio for writing boot image

* [RVM-632] - Space improvements of RVMClass.objectCache

* [RVM-633] - Avoid the use of Reflection to invoke Object.finalize()

* [RVM-644] - Reduce copying of char[] in java.lang.reflect.Proxy

* [RVM-650] - Ask users to submit bug reports on Jikes RVM crashes

** Bug

* [RVM-172] - Failing DaCapo benchmarks on PPC 32 OS X

* [RVM-288] - Assertion failure in inline oracle

* [RVM-318] - java.util.Scanner is unimplemented

* [RVM-346] - SPECjvm98: Invalid runs should not be SUCCESSes

* [RVM-410] - Problem with changes to stack walk

* [RVM-440] - Poisoned tests failing in finalizer thread

* [RVM-471] - Stack frame alignment broken for Intel on OS/X

* [RVM-605] - Possible fix for FreeListPageResource.releasePages()

* [RVM-606] - Problems with OSR guarded inlining of invokeinterface

* [RVM-614] - BaseBasePoisoned build segfaults during VM bootup on pcc64-linux

* [RVM-617] - DaCapo bloat fails with Apache Harmony class library

* [RVM-619] - DaCapo eclipse fails with Apache Harmony class library

* [RVM-621] - DaCapo xalan fails with Apache Harmony class library

* [RVM-623] - Intel 16bit operations with immediate operands in some cases generate 32bit immediate operands rather than 16bit

* [RVM-631] - Bug in new Finalization code

* [RVM-636] - Crash in reflection during JSR-166 TCK

* [RVM-643] - Invalid InstructionFormat usage in Simplifier, but real bug is that IR is semantically malformed

* [RVM-645] - Bug in LiveAnalysis related to modeling of dataflow through Exception edges in the FCFG

* [RVM-646] - Immix defrag broken

* [RVM-652] - build failure on IA32 OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

** Tasks and Sub-task

* [RVM-651] - Add support to Intel assembler for REX prefix byte

* [RVM-667] - Modify the implementation of table switch

* [RVM-669] - Build/boot image runner support for x86 64

* [RVM-671] - Fix spill location size estimates

We're very happy to announce the release of Jikes RVM version 3.0.0.

The road towards 3.0 began just about two years ago and a large number of people, both on the core team and from our user community at large, have contributed to making it a success. Thank You!

The release is available for download at http://downloads.sourceforge.net/jikesrvm/jikesrvm-3.0.0.tar.bz2

The detailed release notes for major changes since 2.9.3 can be found below or in JIRA ( http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/RVM/fixforversion/13530),

but we'd like to highlight some of the larger themes that went into the 3.0 release (many of which have already been released in the 2.9.x releases we've made along the way).

** Normalization of source code and build process

*** Complete rewrite of the build/test systems to use ant.

*** Jikes RVM can be developed in Eclipse using the JDT

*** Extensive restructuring of package structure

*** Removal of VM_ and OPT_ prefixes from all source files.

** Increased system stability and performance

*** A new continuous testing system ( http://jikesrvm.anu.edu.au/cattrack)

*** Concerted stability and performance drives

** Java 5 support

*** Support for Java 5 language features

*** Use of Java 5 language features throughout the code base

Detailed list (89 issues closed in the 3 months since 2.9.3)

** New Feature

• [RVM-358] - Initial support for Apache Harmony class library
• [RVM-480] - Spec JVM 2008 regression test
• [RVM-534] - MMTk Test harness
• [RVM-540] - Implement java.lang.Compiler
• [RVM-591] - Support for jdocs.com javadoc
• [RVM-592] - Checks on creating ObjectReferences

** Improvement

• [RVM-72] - NonMoving annotations for classes instances of which should be allocated to the immortal heap
• [RVM-273] - Remove VM_ prefix from all VM classes
• [RVM-275] - Remove VMOpt prefix from opt compiler classes that go into bootimage
• [RVM-282] - Make dumpVirtualMachine more defensive
• [RVM-329] - Specialize IA32 assembler for lister vs. non-lister
• [RVM-333] - Annotations used for VM Pragmas (NoInline, Uninterruptible, etc) probably should not be as closed linked to classloaders
• [RVM-445] - Clean up handling of JTOC
• [RVM-449] - Handle instanceof and checkcast in ShortArray scalar replacer
• [RVM-477] - Gather new compiler DNA
• [RVM-501] - BuildWithAllClasses is (practically) unused
• [RVM-502] - Dead code elimination of pure calls
• [RVM-505] - Eliminate calls to VM_Class.getClass..FromStackFrame when stack frame is determinable
• [RVM-508] - Have hash map where entries are completely immutable saving references from boot image root set
• [RVM-510] - Create top level common directory to make it easier to split out and share useful components from rvm and MMTk
• [RVM-511] - Split out MMTk option processing support
• [RVM-512] - Experiment with freezing bucket array in VM_HashMap/VM_HashSet
• [RVM-513] - Large arrays in boot image cause memory leak
• [RVM-525] - Upgrade to GNU classpath 0.97.2
• [RVM-537] - Implement inline mustImplementInterface sequence for invokeinterface in baseline compilers
• [RVM-538] - Inline checkcast/instanceof sequences in baseline compiler for simple cases
• [RVM-572] - Remove OSR_ and BC_ prefixes from OnStackReplacement code
• [RVM-593] - Extra checks on references being traced in rvm
• [RVM-603] - Improve intel baseline prologue/epilogue/call by use push/pop instead of mov [sp]
• [RVM-594] - Naming of MM_Interface

** Bug

• [RVM-46] - CaffieneMark failures on AIX/PPC
• [RVM-47] - DaCapo regressions on AIX/PPC
• [RVM-58] - Linker errors under AIX/ppc
• [RVM-105] - sysNetSelect doesnt seem to be avoiding the syswrap select
• [RVM-187] - VM_OptGenericMapIterator: findGCMapIndex failed
• [RVM-221] - Specialized scanning broken on ppc64-aix?
• [RVM-234] - Annotation issues: not implemented via proxy classes, support for serialization
• [RVM-269] - unresolved invokeinterface on <null> should force classloading before rasiing NPE

• [RVM-271] - Timeouts for stress are not correct
• [RVM-303] - Cannot modify accessible final instance fields
• [RVM-325] - Spec JVM 98 jack failing with OOMs
• [RVM-327] - Performance degredation in IA32 assembler
• [RVM-332] - Eclipse 3.2 fails to run on the RVM
• [RVM-369] - PPC32-OSX - Crash in GC when a stack contains native frames
• [RVM-372] - Integer overflow in sysNanoTime
• [RVM-423] - Fop performance strangeness
• [RVM-442] - All poisoned tests fail PPC 32
• [RVM-454] - The sub-test TestAnnotationInheritance of the basic tests is excluded until it can be fixed
• [RVM-458] - Poisoned bit test highlights JNI problem
• [RVM-469] - Fix IA32 assembler to use Address instead of Offset for absolute addressing
• [RVM-482] - Crash when running Production_Opt0_perf portion of compiler-dna test run
• [RVM-483] - Conditionalize fsqrt generation on PowerPC
• [RVM-492] - Dumping empty stack kills VM
• [RVM-493] - VM_Annotation.readValue doesn't use the correct classloader
• [RVM-494] - Conversion between type descriptors, class names, and file names in VM_Atom behaves inconsistently
• [RVM-495] - Crash during first major GC on PPC64 tests when running with -X:processors=2
• [RVM-497] - New scan boot image assertion failing poisoned tests
• [RVM-499] - Overflowing JTOC during DaCapo eclipse run on PPC64 AIX
• [RVM-500] - No such field error: TreeMap$SubMap.minKey
• [RVM-504] - Increase time out on DaCapo eclipse for rvmppclnx64
• [RVM-506] - The field last in VM_HashMap and VM_HashSet is only ever set to null
• [RVM-514] - Pure on mathMagic breaks dacapo sunflow
• [RVM-521] - Freshly checked out r14346 fails to build with an uninterruptible violation
• [RVM-526] - GNU Classpath build: paths too long in check_jni.sh
• [RVM-527] - Harmony doesn't build 32bit libraries as necessary for x86_64 build
• [RVM-529] - Implement reflection API for Harmony
• [RVM-531] - Boot image stack size too small
• [RVM-541] - gc stress failures
• [RVM-542] - Incorrect encoding of inner class native method names
• [RVM-543] - Invoking JNI_OnLoad of unrelated libraries when loading a library with no JNI_OnLoad
• [RVM-544] - Class argument in NewObject ignored
• [RVM-547] - Building the boot image with the opt compiler and Harmony fails
• [RVM-550] - Implementation of isZero magic in PPC baseline compiler can overflow expression stack and corrupt stack frame
• [RVM-571] - BigDecimal Pure annotations causes crash on SPECjbb2005 for FullAdaptiveMarkSweep
• [RVM-582] - Fix all javadoc "syntax" errors
• [RVM-583] - Incorrect rounding on simplified integer divide
• [RVM-585] - RVM Identity HashMap doesn't use identity hashCode.. only identity.equals
• [RVM-587] - IdentityHashMaps in the bootimage
• [RVM-588] - Assertion failure in BC2IR for primitive array load
• [RVM-597] - Array index out of bounds in BC2IR generation context
• [RVM-598] - Increase use of unpreemptible
• [RVM-599] - New poisoned test failures on x86
• [RVM-608] - Object replacement ignores finalizer methods

** Task and Sub-Task

• [RVM-37] - Doccument the command line options
• [RVM-42] - Build/Test infrastructiure to compute compiler DNA
• [RVM-490] - Null Pointer Exception in gnu.xml.transform.ParameterNode.clone
• [RVM-518] - Change build logic so that the VM prefix on a class name does not control inclusion in the bootimage
• [RVM-519] - Rename classes currently with VM_ prefix that will be confusing without it
• [RVM-520] - Update userguide to remove VM_ (and OPT_) prefix globally.

We're very proud to announce that Jikes RVM version 2.9.3 is now available for download! It's been a little bit longer than usual since the last release and there's been quite a bit of activity on the project and improvements to the system. The appended release notes capture many of the highlights; for more details see JIRA.

The release is available from SourceForge.

** Improvement

    * [RVM-81] - Annotations in java.lang classes through bytecode engineering

    * [RVM-195] - Enable inlining of @Pure methods

    * [RVM-274] - Remove OPT_ prefix from all opt compiler classes

    * [RVM-276] - opt compiler package structure

    * [RVM-304] - Improve performance of character encoder when encoding to and from arrays

    * [RVM-305] - Add final annotations to java.io.OutputStreamWriter

    * [RVM-308] - Greater use of StringBuilder rather than StringBuffer

    * [RVM-309] - Greater use of "<Number>.valueOf" rather than "new <Number>"

    * [RVM-310] - Class library fields that could be final aren't final

    * [RVM-311] - String toUpperCase and toLowerCase perform a String.equals to see if the Locale is Turkey per invocation

    * [RVM-322] - Intel assembler register naming improvement

    * [RVM-331] - Implement support for MMX registers

    * [RVM-343] - Support for hardware SQRT instruction

    * [RVM-344] - Simplifier rule for square root operator

    * [RVM-378] - Avoid replicating field and method vectors

    * [RVM-379] - Don't replicate OSR_EncodedOSRMaps

    * [RVM-381] - Upgrade to Classpath 0.97

    * [RVM-385] - Refactor reflection to use VM interface

    * [RVM-387] - Baseline compiler emits RegDisp instructions when the Disp is 0

    * [RVM-390] - VM_Statics/JTOC space saving has cost us single iteration fop performance

    * [RVM-391] - Assign CPU # to each VM_Processor to have more predictable performance results. 

    * [RVM-392] - Improvements to ZipEntry

    * [RVM-395] - Local common sub-expression elimination of Pure method calls

    * [RVM-408] - Simple elimination of stack traces

    * [RVM-417] - Switch performance runs to using a profiled image

    * [RVM-421] - Pre-allocate 1 set of exception registers for athrow

    * [RVM-422] - Update to latest Classpath j.u.c.CopyOnWriteArrayList

    * [RVM-431] - Fix processor JNI entry/collector rendezvous race

    * [RVM-433] - Increase final fields in java.nio

    * [RVM-435] - Don't allocate memory when converting C buffers to Strings or Classes

    * [RVM-437] - Integer.toString doesn't keep cache of common values

    * [RVM-451] - Structure of code in GNU Classpath java.util.Vector and java.util.Arraylist interacts poorly with inlining

** New Feature

    * [RVM-210] - Add Image sizes tracking to Regression report and mailout

    * [RVM-319] - Create X10 test harness

    * [RVM-406] - Add Immix garbage collector

    * [RVM-441] - Sticky mark bits collector

    * [RVM-457] - Immix Garbage Collectors

    * [RVM-266] - Provide preliminary support for a non-copying unsynchronised StringBuffer implementation

** Task and Sub-task

    * [RVM-425] - Implement 2d array helper for PPC baseline

    * [RVM-224] - Push OSR-specific fields in VM_NormalMethod to subclass/side data structure

    * [RVM-450] - Prevent compilation at max opt level before some dynamic call graph information has been gathered

    * [RVM-453] - Testing framework missing failures in basic tests that use diff for sanity.

** Bug

    * [RVM-196] - VM_Processor not assignable with VM_GreenScheduler

    * [RVM-314] - Support for Java 1.4 assertions

    * [RVM-315] - java.lang.Method.invoke changes the parameters

    * [RVM-316] - A Null pointer for the UTF8CHARSET in java.util.zip.ZipFile$PartialInputStream

    * [RVM-326] - Failing basic tests don't signal failure

    * [RVM-330] - Thread.sleep() does not handle interrupts correctly

    * [RVM-339] - Image bloat (code +25% & data +5%)

    * [RVM-340] - Annotations don't handle arrays of primitive types correctly

    * [RVM-342] - NPE with advice files

    * [RVM-347] - PPC 64 regressions and Intel stress regressions since the introduction of read barriers

    * [RVM-351] - Javac regression

    * [RVM-352] - Running many iterations of _200_check fails floating point remainder test

    * [RVM-353] - Production Opt 0 builds broken

    * [RVM-355] - Complete SPEC JVM with 20 iterations dies in GC

    * [RVM-357] - Fatal error when synchronising on null objects

    * [RVM-365] - PPC (AIX) Stack Scanning Appears Broken

    * [RVM-368] - Compiler confusion over equal but non-identical objects

    * [RVM-374] - Static field allocation is non-deterministic

    * [RVM-380] - We create a lot (15909) optimization plan atomic elements using 572724bytes in the boot image

    * [RVM-383] - Branch likely and unlikely prefixes show up as LOCK prefixes in x86 disassembler output

    * [RVM-394] - Tune inlining of arraycopy

    * [RVM-412] - Latent branch optimization bug when maximizing blocks

    * [RVM-424] - Multianewarray confusion in opt compiler

    * [RVM-439] - OSR triggering code misuses suspend/resume

    * [RVM-447] - Inline size estimation reduction factor calculation over rates precise information causing bloat and slow down

    * [RVM-452] - Off-by-one error in "VMField.checkReadAccess" and "VM.checkWriteAccess"

    * [RVM-456] - Clean build broken

    * [RVM-464] - Opt compiler ldc_w for class literal broken

    * [RVM-466] - Four tests in test run "tiny" fail when compiled with -X:aos:initial_compiler=opt -X:aos:enable_recompilation=false

    * [RVM-467] - BURS performing illegal reordering to before PEI

    * [RVM-468] - Instanceof test differs in opt compiler from baseline for instanceof/checkcast of magic[][]

    * [RVM-478] - Redesign AIX native method Linkage conventions to protect CMID field from being smashed by native code saved CR

Congratulations to Georgios Gousios (Athens University of Economics and Business), Byeongcheol Lee (University of Texas in Austin), Filip Pizlo (Purdue University) for being selected to work on Jikes RVM projects for the SoC. Georgios is working on Jikes RVM and JNode integration, Byeongcheol is working on extending debugger support, Filip is looking at extending the threading model.

I'm pleased to announce the Jikes RVM has been accepted into the Google Summer of Code for the 2nd year! We have a range of mentors bringing together experience from the Jikes RVM and related projects. Please have a look at our project proposals and our application template. As with last year, if you think there is an interesting project that should be listed but hasn't been then please feel free to propose it. To better integrate with our bug and feature tracking system we would much prefer if such proposals could also be added in to our issue tracker. We look forward to interest from prospective students! Don't forget the deadline for applications is March 31st.

Jikes RVM (nee Jalapeno) turned 10 years old last week!  The first lines of code in what became Jikes RVM were written by Derek Lieber on Nov 21, 1997.