Project Guest VM: What's Changed

November 2009, Version 0.2.1

What's New

• More of the NIO subsystem has been implemented, specifically socket channels with support for non-blocking operations.
• New script run_jre that assumes an attached virtual disk containing the JDK and sets java.home accordingly.
• New project GuestVMJDK. This is separate because it must be on the bootclasspath when building an image or running the inspector. It provides a class that raises the native dispatcher interface for NIO channels from pointers, i.e., long, to java.nio.ByteBuffer.

What's Changed

• Notable bug fix: spawning java "processes" failed due to java command having moved to bin subdirectory

October 2009, Version 0.2

What's New

• Floating point operations are now fully supported via the fdlibm library.
• Compressed zip files now work courtesy of the GNU Classpath compression code.
• Fledgling support for java.lang.Process. See here for details.
• Maxine has become much more stable in this release with the result that some large applications now run under Guest VM. Instructions for running standalone Hadoop are provided.
• File deletion and renaming have been implemented in the ext2 filesystem.

What's Changed

• Better file system management, including multiple virtual disks, the ability to specify the mount path for each virtual disk, and a pseudo file system that provides the illusion of a root based at "/". There is an associated change from the previous release in the way file systems are specified. The property guestvm.fs.list has been replaced by guestvm.fs.table and this has a new syntax, similar to Unix's /etc/fstab. See here for details.
• The default values for user.dir and user.home have been changed to /tmp.
• The run, java, runins and guest scripts have been moved in the new bin subdirectory.
• The contents of the ext2scripts directory have been moved into bin.