Java on uClinux

Tue Nov 15 11:49:00 GMT 2005

Andrew Haley wrote:
> Bernd Schmidt writes:
> > David Daney wrote:
> > > Perhaps not in general, but one unstated premise of this whole thread is 
> > > that for some GCC targets (most Unix like operating systems) you *can* 
> > > count on a SIGSEGV when you dereference a null pointer. The java front 
> > > end takes advantage of this fact to eliminate explicit checks for 
> > > dereferencing of null pointers.
> > 
> > Oh.
> > 
> > Speaking of which, has anyone ported gcj to a MMU-less uClinux platform yet?
>> It's impossible with the current config. This is because some of
> libgcj is written on C++, and the C++ compiler FE does not insert
> checks for null pointer accesses. I wrote a small patch to do this
> but it was rejected.

Hmm, we can trap null pointer accesses, but I don't think we deliver 
reliable SIGSEGV signals yet or provide a means of getting the faulting 
address. If that was fixed, is there anything obvious that stands in 
the way of a uClinux/uClibc port?
Bernd