Release of Jaguar v2.0 - Fast Java Communication and I/O

[Matt Welsh <mdw at cs dot berkeley dot edu>]

I am happy to announce the release of Jaguar v2.0, a system enabling
high-performance communication and I/O from Java. 

It is available from:
	http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~mdw/proj/jaguar

This release is targeted at Linux x86 systems, however, it should be 
portable to other platforms. The software is entirely Open Source.

Jaguar is an extension of the Java runtime environment which enables direct 
Java access to operating system and hardware resources, such as fast network 
interfaces, memory-mapped and programmed I/O, and specialized machine 
instruction sets. Jaguar can be thought of as a replacement for the Java 
Native Interface. Unlike the JNI, however, Jaguar does not require copying 
of data between the JVM and C code, nor expensive traversals between the 
Java and native code contexts. Rather, Jaguar relies upon a flexible 
bytecode translation technique which directly inlines specialized "driver" 
code to access low-level system resources from Java while maintaining type 
safety. This translation can be performed by a JIT compiler or a static 
("ahead of time") compiler.

Jaguar v2.0 is implemented as a Java-based "front-end" compiler which
translates Java bytecode to "Jaguar bytecode", identical to Java bytecode
except for several additional instructions required to perform direct 
memory access. Only Jaguar driver code (which is inlined in with application
code during the translation step from Java to Jaguar bytecode) may make use
of these instructions. The Jaguar "back-end" compiler, an extension of
GCJ (http://sourceware.cygnus.com/java), translates the generated Jaguar
bytecode to machine code for execution.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments!

Matt Welsh, mdw@cs.berkeley.edu
UC Berkeley Computer Science Division