[fedora-java] Eclipse and JVM memory settings

[Andrew Overholt]

Hi,

Now that we have people using Eclipse on IcedTea, we have people
starting to hit memory limits.  I don't understand the situation very
well, but here are some links to Eclipse bug reports, etc.:

http://www.eclipsezone.com/eclipse/forums/t101303.rhtml

http://wiki.eclipse.org/FAQ_How_do_I_increase_the_permgen_size_available_...

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=195897
 - the Eclipse launcher (largely written in C) can tell if it's running
   on a Sun VM on Windows -- it looks like it reads .dll headers -- but
   not on Linux

I spoke briefly with Andrew Niefer and a few other people on IRC and
here are a few options for fixing the launcher to work with the -XX
options in both the Sun VM and non-Sun VM cases:

  1. try starting the VM using the invocation api (using libjvm.so) with
     the PermSize argument and see if it fails - if it does, launch
     without the option.  This may add some startup delay to VMs that
     don't support this option.  This was suggested in the eclipse.org
     bug I link to above.

  2. look for a jre/LICENSE text file and seeing if it starts with "Sun
     Microsystems".  Andrew Niefer suggested this option.

Can anyone think of anything better?  Note that I don't want to add a
shell wrapper around the binary Eclipse launcher unless we absolutely
have to.

The Eclipse launcher code can be seen in CVS here:

:pserver:[e-mail]:/cvsroot/eclipse
Module:  org.eclipse.equinox.executable
Branch:  R3_3_maintenance (or HEAD if you like)

Specifically, library/win32/eclipseWin.c in the isSunVM() function.
library/eclipseNix.c has an isSunVM() that just returns 0.

Andrew