SableVM 1.1.7 *prerelease* available - please test!

Hi everyone,

It's been much too long since release of 1.1.6 and it will take a while
before we see 1.1.8.  Hopefuly we'll start making daily "staging" [1]
snapshots available way before 1.1.8 release, but this does not change
the fact 1.1.7 will be THE SableVM version for some time.

There've been quite a lot of changes from 1.1.6 and I am afraid that
without proper testing releasing 1.1.7 is just not feasible.  Therefore
I am writing this email to ask you all to give SableVM a try.  Run a few
of your favourite applications, run some benchmarks you usually run
and report whether they work or not, and whethere this is a regression
(they used to work with previous version) or not.

The tar archives for SableVM 1.1.7 PRE are available at:

	http://gadek.homelinux.org/1.1.7-pre

You need to fech, configure, make, make install *both* sablevm and
sablevm-classpath.  Please note that this version makes use of zlib so
you also need to install zlib-dev (or zlib1g-dev on Debian systems).


Here comes the list of most important changes since 1.1.6 (and please
correct me if I missed something):

* NEW: Generational Garbage Collector (available on request by passing
  --with-gc=gencopy to configure, plese test it and report!).
* Imported new GNU Classpath CVS snapshot as of Sun Oct 10 18:00:00
  UTC 2004.
* Added handling of Jar/Zip files on boot classpath. Closes BUG:2.
* Allow for multiple elements and prepending/appending to boot class
  path.
* Added --with-profiling switch to make most functions non-"static".
* Fixed copy&paste mistake in PopLocalFrame. Closes BUG62.
* Fixed several JNI methods not returning NULL on errors. Closes BUG:12.
* Fixed IsInstanceOf always returning JNI_FALSE. Closes BUG:63.
* Fixed "New array" overflow.  Closes BUG:8.
* Fixed out-of-source builds. Closes BUG:55.
* Fixed handling 'double' values on ARM.
* On Linux / Intel x86 put FPU in 64-bit precision mode. Closes BUG:1.
* Fixed F2L, F2I, D2L, D2I conversions to check for overflows. Closes
  BUG:54.
* Don't let SIGPIPE kill the VM. Closes BUG:51.
* Fixed GNU make detection on non-GNU/Linux platforms.
* Make sablevm-classpath install its files in default locations.
* Grep for "Main-Class:" string in MANIFEST.MF in case-insensitive way.
* Don't even try to compile classpath with gcj or kjc (it never worked).
* Make jikes and gcc less verbose by default (to avoid confusion).
* Remove some obsolete code from various places.

Please let us know how it went, ether using mailing lists or preferably
our bug tracking system available at http://sablevm.org/bugs

Happy testing!

				Grzegorz B. Prokopski

PS: I've just noticed the sablevm-classpath archive contains some of
.svn directories.  This will have to be fixed in the final release.

-- 
Grzegorz B. Prokopski      <[email protected]>
Debian GNU/Linux           http://www.debian.org
SableVM - LGPL'ed Java VM  http://www.sablevm.org
Why SableVM ?!?            http://sablevm.org/wiki/Features