Working with the Open Sourced Hotspot Sources

The sources in the World project builds Hotspot and Java SE. In this tutorial, we examine the World project in the IDE and learn what we can do with it.

This project exists solely for building the entire Open JDK source code, i.e., both the Hotspot VM and the JDK. Building this project takes considerable time and disk space. Expect several hours and over 3GB.

Note: To build the Hotspot VM from sources, you will need Sun Studio compilers. Detailed instructions can be found in this article: Using OpenJDK HotSpot with NetBeans C/C++ Development Pack.

When encountering problems of any kind, please consult the Troubleshooting Guide.

Setting up

Download and install the OpenJDK sources, and then open the World project, as explained in Getting Started with OpenJDK in NetBeans IDE.

Once you have opened the project, the Projects window should look as follows:

Note: Since this is a Make-based project, follow the instructions in Setting Up an Environment for the NetBeans Make-Based OpenJDK Projects.

Building the Hotspot Sources

To build the Hotspot sources, right-click the World project in the Projects window and choose Build Project. The IDE runs the Ant script for the project and shows output in the Output window.

To view the build results, go to the Favorites window (Ctrl-3) and browse to the "control" folder. Once you have added the folder, you can see the newly created "build" folder, containing your build output, as shown in the following image:

Note: As shown above, the results of building this project are not in the same place as with the J2SE project.

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