JVMXM008 workaround

Brian D. Carlstrom wrote:

At Stanford I have my own automated regression infrastructure that runs processor simulations remotely via ssh. One problem that has existed for months is this error from jbuild.linkImage:

JVMXM008: Error occured while initialising System ClassException in thread “main” Could not create the Java virtual machine.

I noticed that Sergiy Kyrylkov had posted in his blog about a similar issue when running JikesRVM regressions from cron:

http://sergiy.kyrylkov.name/blog/Jikes%20RVM/

I found that if I forced the ssh remote bash to be a login shell, I did not get the error. Eventually I narrowed it down to the fact that /etc/profile was sourcing /etc/profile.d/lang.sh which was setting the LANG environment variable. I found that if I my remote command set LANG explicitly, I can build jikesrvm over ssh without the JVMXM008 error.

I just wanted to post the workaround to the list in case it helps someone else. I don’t know if it is needed for later SDKs, but my version of JikesRVM seems to only work with 1.4.1, nothing earlier, nothing later.

For the record, this is on Fedora Core 4 on G5 machines running IBM’s SDK 1.4.1-SR2 with a jikesrvm source tree from last updated at “2005-12-09 03:00:00”. We are frozen until after some paper deadlines this month…
I hope I’ll have time soon to try this workaround on UNM machines.