http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/hotspot-dev/2012-November/007294.html Hi there, during the last days I worked on fixing the Shark compiler for Hotspot to get it to build and run again, with the latest Hotspot code and LLVM. Here are some details: - A lot of changes are just to make it build and the compiler happy. For example, I had to remove a lot of 'const' qualifiers because of API changes in LLVM. - Most other changes have to do with the split of the oop and metadata class hierarchies in Hotspot. - Then there have been a few changes caused by LLVM changes and improvements, most notably the LLVM intrinsics for atomic operations (memory barrier and cmpxchg) have been removed and now have a representation directly in LLVM's IR. This makes our code a little nicer. I tested this by running a number of applications, most notably Eclipse (which is notoriously difficult on VMs), Java2Demo, SwingSet2 and a bunch of other stuff. I would like to get this integrated into OpenJDK now if possible. You can find the full webrev here: http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~rkennke/shark/webrev.00/ There are also a very minor change required in JDK: http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~rkennke/shark/webrev-jdk-00/ In order to build it, apply the patches on hsx/hotspot-comp 's hotspot and jdk repositories respectivly. Find my build script here: http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~rkennke/shark/Build8-zero-shark (Review and adjust variables to your settings, most notably you will need to change LLVM_CONFIG to point to your LLVM 3.1 installation.) Please let me know if there are any issues or how we can get this integrated into Hotspot. Best regards, Roman