Andrew Dinn from Red Hat is visiting Scotland at the start of March. He is running a series of seminars on the OpenJDK system, in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Andrew's visit to Scotland is funded by a SICSA Distinguished Industrial Visiting Fellowship. Andrew has spent time at various UK universities including Oxford, Manchester and Heriot Watt.

Apart from Wednesday afternoon, all sessions will be at the School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow in Sir Alwyn Williams building room 422.

Tuesday 4 March

  • - lunch
  • - Introduction to OpenJDK (abstract)
    This intro talk is a historical overview of the Open Source project -- how the code was open sourced, who governs it, who contributes, how it is planned and managed, how the components are developed and integrated into releases, which sub-projects are currently in progress and how they work to feed into the releasable JVM. I'll also talk about what has been done to develop and extend OpenJDK over the years both by Sun/Oracle and by those of us on the outside. [pdf]
  • - coffee
  • - OpenJDK Technical Overview (abstract)
    I will explain the JVM and JDK architecture and design, how the code is factored (both horizontally into generic and arch/os-specific layers and vertically into independent VM functions), plus some deeper details of the theory and operation of the compiler, code generation and GC components. [pdf]

Wednesday 5 March

  • Research Seminar: Shenandoah Garbage Collection (abstract)
    An overview of the Shenandoah Ultra-Low-Pause-Time Garbage Collector, currently under development at Red Hat. [pdf]
  • at Edinburgh Informatics (room 4/31) Research Seminar: Porting Java to AArch64: Bits of History, Words of Advice (abstract)

    Red Hat's project of porting OpenJDK to run on ARM's new 64-bit architecture began about 18 months ago. This talk will relate some of the things learnt along the way and offer advice to anyone interested in porting to some other architecture. [pdf]

Thursday 6 March

  • Please follow these instructions to download and build OpenJDK 8 on a Linux machine. Then you will be ready to follow the start the workshop walkthrough.
  • OpenJDK hacking session (abstract) bring a Linux laptop
    This practical hacking session covers obtaining the code (negotiating the multitude of different mercurial trees for the various OpenJDK projects/sub-projects), downloading and building it and running/debugging the JVM.
  • lunch
  • OpenJDK hacking session continued...
  • Photos from workshop

All SICSA members are welcome to attend any events in the OpenJDK School series. Please mail jeremy dot singer at glasgow.ac.uk if you plan to attend, so we can keep track of numbers for catering.