[kaffe] JVM in Hardware

[Samuel Goto]

Hi,

    I am a brazilian computer engeneering student ( 4th year ), and I
am in a very interesting project : a java virtual machine in hardware.
 
    It is a bytecode processor (not a JIT, it is more like an
interpreter), and it is being written in ArchC (www.archc.org), witch
is a architecture description language for hardware simulation.
Altough it has already been done (sun, JOP, etc), i believe this is
the first hardware port of kaffe ....

    I am taking a Kaffe based architecture to build the processor, and
I am having some problems with it ... I want to write a java
interpreter (like the virtualMachine() function in
kaffe/kaffevm/intr/machine.c), but I don't know how to put the hole
class structures (constant pools, methods area, stack, etc) in memory
and find them. I won't be using a GC ... I am thinking that I could
run all of the class loading/linking/verifying (all kaffe code before
virtualMachine()) and then put it all in memory .... then start
interpreting bytecodes in method main() of the class ...
  
    I have many question (like needed registers, stack pointers,
memory division, etc), and I am not sure if this is the right place to
ask them. Is there anyone who could help me ?

    Oh, by the way, what a incredable piece of software Kaffe is !!
Congratulations for all of the dev team ... I've run some simple
examples and it seems to be working fine !!!


    cya, samuel goto

     http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~ra017335