Hotspot JIT output disassembly on Fedora 18

Well, I was very thrilled when I saw that it is possible to output assembly code produced by Hotspot. But, the problem is that this isn't enabled by default, at least not on Fedora 18. It is necessary to compile decompiler plugin before you can try this. To make things worse, this compilation process assumes that you don't have binutils already installed so it tries to compile that too. In the end, I managed to get that working and here is how.

First, you need to download OpenJDK's source. Note that there is source in Fedora's binary repository but this is only the source of Jaba API packages. So, you have to download the real source, either from java.net or approriate SRPM. In both cases be careful to download source that matches OpenJDK you have installed on your machine.

Next, unpack the source and go to the directory openjdk/hotspot/src/share/tools/hsdis. Now, open hsdis.c file and replace the following line:

#include <sysdep.h>

with the following lines:

#include <string.h>
#include <errno.h>

Now, compile the source using the following command:

gcc -o hsdis-amd64.so -DLIBARCH_amd64 -DLIBARCH="amd64" \
       -DLIB_EXT=".so" -m64 -fPIC -O hsdis.c -shared \
       -ldl -lopcodes

The compilation will fail unless you have binutils-devel package installed. So, take care about that. In case the compilation was successful you'll have hsdis-amd64.so file. It's a dynamic library. Note that I'm using 64 bit AMD/Intel architecture. If you are using 32 bit version replace amd64 with i386 and -m64 with -m32. In case of some other architecture you'll have to find out yourself what's the name.

Now, you'll need some Java class that you'll run and that will produce assembly output. The main point you should have in mind is that the code has to be such to provoke JIT to be started. Otherwise, you'll don't get any assembly output.  I used the following simple class file:

import java.math.BigInteger;

class Multiply
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        BigInteger a = BigInteger.ONE;

        for (int i = 0; i < 10000; i++)
            a = a.multiply(BigInteger.valueOf(2));
        System.out.println(a);
    }
}

After compiling it, run it using the following command:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. java -XX:+UnlockDiagnosticVMOptions \
    -XX:+PrintAssembly -XX:PrintAssemblyOptions=intel \
    Multiply

Note that I'm using LD_LIBRARY_PATH to tell JIT where disassembler (hsdis) is. In my case everything is in the current directory. Note that in the previous command I specified that I want Intel assembly syntax. The default one is AT&T.