I got two emails with zero patches yesterday. One I was expecting, from Yi Zhan of Intel who has it working on ia64; the other was totally out of the blue, from Ruediger Oertel of SuSE who has it building on s390 and s390x. I always hoped it would Just Work™ but I never quite believed it! Now all I need is the time to integrate it all!

Which I may just have. While I was poking around trying to fix the IcedTea 7 stack overflow I discovered that a) we mark a lot of stack unusable with 64kb pages, and b) the stack region locator doesn’t seem to work, at least for the cases with guard pages, or for ia64, or possibly with 64kb pages when the Java thread is an initial thread. I spent some time looking into it and rewriting it, and I think I have it sussed. (If you ever wanted to know where ia64 puts its guard pages then you need this!) Now it all seems to work I’m going to spend the afternoon writing some emails to the HotSpot list, then next week I intend to hole up and implement my holy grail of a zero build system that does not require any patching to build on a new architecture.

So don’t expect any action from me until that’s done :)