[ELDK] OpenJDK and Other Questions

[Wolfgang Denk]

Dear Jason,

In message <8f9e78f00809120734s683ed4e0if88fec4779d00209 at mail.gmail.com> you wrote:
> 
> 1.) OpenJDK - I'd like to get OpenJDK running on my target platforms.
> Is anybody currently working on such an effort or interested in doing
> so? General comments on suitability of these platforms for running
> OpenJDK?

We have not much experience with  using  Java  in  embedded  systems.
Maybe  others  are  in  a  better  position  to  anser this question.
[However, ELDk 4.2 includes gcj, so you can do some Java  development
within  the  ELDK context. Don't know if this is good enough for your
purposes.]

> 2.) Community Size - I'm hoping someone can provide some information
> about the number of users/companies actively using ELDK (and perhaps

I guess it's impossible to tell the number of  actual  ELDK  users  -
many,  many  of  them  just  download  the code without ever becoming
visible on mailing lists or similar. You can get a little  indication
for  example  by  looking at the statistics collected by the Embedded
Linux polls performed by linuxdevices.com, but  again  this  reflects
only a small fraction of the market.

> more generally AMCC processors). I was looking at the ELDK mailing
> list archives and was a little surprised there weren't more postings.

There may be two explantions for this: (1) this list is  not  so  old
(it  was  started  only 10 months ago) and we do not make much rumour
about it; (2) quite a lot of  people  prefer  not  to  use  a  public
mailing  list  but  rather  contact  un  directly - for example, most
requests regarding AMCC processors go through our commercial  support
channel.

> Don't get me wrong - I think you guys have a very nice offering.  It's
> important to me because I'd like to be confident the platform choices
> I'm making have a viable and sustainable community of users,
> developers, etc.

You might dig a bit in the PPC and U-Boot mailing list  archives  and
you  probably  would  get  a little impression of how many people use
ELDK, and what they think about it.

> 3.) Documentation - Good set of online docs. Section 8 seems to be
> missing content, however. Any pointers to other good reading

Yes, there are many things missing, or have not completely be changed
to arech/powerpc specifics yet. On the other hand, the  documentation
is  a wiki, so everybody is welcome to contribute. Unfortunately only
few actually do that.

> materials/resources you guys would recommend (specific to Building and
> Using Modules)?

There is nothing special in ELDK about using modules. You  have  some
Linux  kernel  directory somewhere where you configure and build your
Linux kernel (this is a prerequisite for building modules); then  you
"cd" into the directory which holds your module source code and type
"make ARCH=powerpc -C <your_linux_tree> M=`pwd` modules". That's it.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

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