[kaffe] arm emulated by GXemul [1]

[Kiyo Inaba]

Hi all,

Since I usually don't test kaffe snap on arm based machines, but see
several ML messages saying, 'kaffe can not be compiled for arm, and
so on' or 'kaffe awt does not work for arm, and so on' several times.

So, I spent some time to get some 'portable' environment to test kaffe
for arm. Of course, at very begining, I think QEMU based approach
should be the way to go (according to http://www.mail-archive.com/search
?l=kaffe%40kaffe.org&q=qemu, Guilhem and several others have experiences
to use QEMU for verifying kaffe), but I noticed there is another
approach.

If you see netbsd site (http://www.netbsd.org), you can find one
interesting page titled 'Running NetBSD on emulated hardware'
(http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/emulators.html), and in this page
the program 'gxemul' is discussed.

In the GXemul homepage (http://http://gavare.se/gxemul/), you may
be able to find so many different architectures are supported by
single emulation software! (please check Installing and running
"guest OSes" page in GXemul homepage).

Following the instructions provided for 'NetBSD/cats' ports, I can
successfully install NetBSD, and then can prepare compilation environment
for kaffe (just add jikes, and gnu-make).

After that, I can successfully configure kaffe with
      --with-engine=intrp \
      --enable-pure-java-math \
      --with-threads=unix-jthreads \
      --disable-boehm-gc-configuration \
      --with-gc=kaffe-gc \
      --disable-sound \
      --without-x \
      --disable-native-awt \
      --disable-gtk-peer \
      --disable-gconf-peer \
      --disable-plugin
and, the configuration process has been completed.

Since I don't have enough time to do the compilation itself (and of
course invoke regression test) right now, but I hope I can continue
this effort for this weekend.

Thanks heavily (or "Tack sa mycket") to Mr. Anders Gavere for his
cute program ;-)

Kiyo
P.S. Of course, I have several small ev-boards based on arm cpu, but
     if I use these as development platforms, it can not be a
     'portable' environment, in my definition. I really want to
     debug kaffe while I am in business trip :-)