Cross-Architectural Performance Portability of a Java Virtual Machine Implementation

This paper describes our experience in porting Compaq’s Fast VM from the Alpha processor architecture to the Intel x86 processor architecture. We encountered several opportunities and pitfalls along the way in porting a JVM designed for a RISC architecture to a CISC architecture. Our goal was to preserve most of the FastVM’s performance benefits already available on the Alpha platform, and modify or discover new optimizations as they were required for x86. We found that by porting a fast RISC JVM to x86, we could generate a JVM with performance competitive to state-of-the-art production JVM implementations.