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HotSpot Internals

This wiki is owned by the HotSpot Group.  It is written for programmers working on the HotSpot JVM system. This includes programmers of systems which generate JVM bytecodes (i.e., language implementors).

In order to be able to edit pages in this wiki, you must be a member of the HotSpot Group.  Please read the FAQ entry for the OpenJDK wikis which explains the editing rules.

Contents

Intentions and non-intentions

This wiki contains:

• An architectural guide to the Runtime, Compiler, GC, Serviceability, etc.
• Details on performance techniques.
• A place to document likely future work (major refactorings or cleanups, new optimizations, etc.).
• Links to relevant email discussion threads, e.g., on the Hotspot compiler-dev list.
• Quick links to similar information in other places on the web.
  • http://java.sun.com/javase/technologies/hotspot ("Java SE HotSpot at a Glance")
  • http://openjdk.java.net/groups/hotspot/ (OpenJDK HotSpot Project home)
  • HotSpot-related research at the Johannes Kepler University Linz
• Information which, once written, is expected to remain accurate and relevant, as long as the related code remains stable.

Please look for the following types of information elsewhere:

• Not general project information.
• Not a developers guide.
• Not a substitute for comments in the source code.
• Not a list of bugs or tasks.
• Not a blog, forum, or the comments section thereof.

Interesting tasks to do

• Extract links and info. from messages and blog postings, especially via hotspot-dev@openjdk.
• Extract links and info. from historical Oracle/Sun mailing lists and wikis.
• Write down understandings of major modules as they are (re-)acquired from trips through the code.