NOTE: You probably want to check out the latest release

Announcing Developer Preview Release 1

I'm pleased to announce the first Developer Preview Release of the open-source port of Java 6 to Mac OS X. This release includes support for 32-bit and 64-bit Intel machines running Mac OS X Leopard (10.5).

Port Status

(Nearly) everything up to and including Swing (X11) is functional. Sound is not currently supported.

While I've spent some time testing this release with my own projects, this preview release should be considered beta quality. The project is very much in need of additional community testing -- If you're hankering for Java 6, please give this a try! See below for information on submitting bug reports.

This work represents quite a few of my weekend and evening hours -- I hope you find it useful! Additionally, this port wouldn't be possible without building on the amazing FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD porting work.

Tiger Support

While bugs in Tiger's compiler currently prevent the building of the 32-bit JDK, it should be possible to build the JDK on Leopard using MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET and the MacOSX 10.4u SDK.

I plan on working on Tiger support over Thanksgiving. If you get this working before I get around to it, let me know!

Supporting PowerPC

Implementing PowerPC hotspot/interpreter support would require an incredible amount of work, and is not something I have planned. Most impressively, Gary Benson of Red Hat has implemented initial PowerPC interpreter support for OpenJDK. It's possible that this could be used to implement Mac OS X/PowerPC at some future date. I still have PowerPC Macs, so I'll look into this eventually.

Fetching the Sources

Sources are available as a downloadable archive, or from a mercurial repository. To download the source code, you must be a licensee in good standing under the Java Research License. To ensure compliance, downloading the source requires authentication:

Username: 'jrl' and Password: 'I am a Licensee in good standing'

Download: jdk6_devpreview_r1.tar.gz

The development repository is also available via mercurial: http://hg.bikemonkey.org/javasrc_1_6_jrl_darwin/. The release tag is jdk6_devpreview_r1.

By downloading this source code, you certify that you are a Licensee in good standing under the Java Research License of the Java 2 SDK, and that your access, use, and distribution of code and information you may obtain at this site is subject to the License. Please review the license at http://java.net/jrl.csp, and submit your license acceptance to Sun.

Building the JDK

Building the full JDK will take quite some time -- up to an hour on my Mac Pro. You can tune the number of parallel jobs with the HOTSPOT_BUILD_JOBS and PARALLEL_BUILD_JOBS make tunables (eg, PARALLEL_BUILD_JOBS=4), which will speed things up considerably on multi-core machines.

There are two builds available for the 64-bit and 32-bit VMs: debug, and release. The debug JRE is significantly slower than the release version -- for day to day work, I suggest using the release build.

OpenMotif is a required build dependency. I've installed it using MacPorts. If you install it using Fink, or by hand, be sure to update the ALT_MOTIF_DIR build setting accordingly.

When the build is complete, a full JDK image will be available in javasrc_1_6_jrl_darwin/control/build/<build style>/j2sdk-image. You can copy/rename the j2sdk-image directory as appropriate (ie, /usr/local/darwin-jdk16-32bit). To use the new JDK, set the JAVA_HOME environmental variable and (optionally) add the j2sdk-image directory to the start of your path.

Lastly, I expect the 64-bit JVM to be faster than the 32-bit JVM, but I've yet to do benchmarks.

64-bit Release Version:

cd control/make env DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=`pwd`/../build/bsd-amd64/lib/amd64/server \ make ALT_BOOTDIR=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home \ ALT_MOTIF_DIR=/opt/local SYS_CFLAGS="" LANG="C" JAVA_HOME="" CLASSPATH="" \ LD_LIBRARY_PATH="" MAKEFLAGS="" SKIP_COMPARE_IMAGES="YES" \ BUILD_DEPLOY="false" ALT_DEVTOOLS_PATH=/usr ALT_CUPS_HEADERS_PATH=/usr/include \ HOTSPOT_BUILD_JOBS=1 PARALLEL_BUILD_JOBS=1 BSD_OVERRIDE_ARCH=amd64

The JDK will be built in control/build/bsd-amd64/j2sdk-image

64-bit Debug Version:

cd control/make env DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=`pwd`/../build/bsd-amd64-debug/lib/amd64/server \ make ALT_BOOTDIR=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home \ ALT_MOTIF_DIR=/opt/local SYS_CFLAGS="" LANG="C" JAVA_HOME="" CLASSPATH="" \ LD_LIBRARY_PATH="" MAKEFLAGS="" SKIP_COMPARE_IMAGES="YES" \ BUILD_DEPLOY="false" ALT_DEVTOOLS_PATH=/usr ALT_CUPS_HEADERS_PATH=/usr/include \ HOTSPOT_BUILD_JOBS=1 PARALLEL_BUILD_JOBS=1 BSD_OVERRIDE_ARCH=amd64 debug_build

The JDK will be built in control/build/bsd-amd64-debug/j2sdk-image

32-bit Release Version:

cd control/make env DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=`pwd`/../build/bsd-i586/lib/i386/client \ make ALT_BOOTDIR=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home \ ALT_MOTIF_DIR=/opt/local SYS_CFLAGS="" LANG="C" JAVA_HOME="" CLASSPATH="" \ LD_LIBRARY_PATH="" MAKEFLAGS="" SKIP_COMPARE_IMAGES="YES" \ BUILD_DEPLOY="false" ALT_DEVTOOLS_PATH=/usr ALT_CUPS_HEADERS_PATH=/usr/include \ HOTSPOT_BUILD_JOBS=1 PARALLEL_BUILD_JOBS=1

The JDK will be built in control/build/bsd-i586/j2sdk-image

32-bit Debug Version:

cd control/make env DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=`pwd`/../build/bsd-i586-debug/lib/i386/client \ make ALT_BOOTDIR=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home \ ALT_MOTIF_DIR=/opt/local SYS_CFLAGS="" LANG="C" JAVA_HOME="" CLASSPATH="" \ LD_LIBRARY_PATH="" MAKEFLAGS="" SKIP_COMPARE_IMAGES="YES" \ BUILD_DEPLOY="false" ALT_DEVTOOLS_PATH=/usr ALT_CUPS_HEADERS_PATH=/usr/include \ HOTSPOT_BUILD_JOBS=1 PARALLEL_BUILD_JOBS=1 debug_build

The JDK will be built in control/build/bsd-i586-debug/j2sdk-image

Submitting Bug Reports

There are bugs, and you're likely to find one. The most useful bug report is one that includes a simple, compilable reproduction case -- that gives me what I need to track down the really tricky bugs.

In submitting a bug, please include the following information:

An e-mail address I can use to contact you if I have any further questions

If at all possible, a simple, compilable test case that reproduces the issue

The java hotspot error log (hs_err_pid.log)

Bug reports may be submitted to landonf (at) macports (dot) org.