Volker Simonis — SAP JVM Internals

The SAP JVM is a standard compliant, certified, commercial JDK with the most extensive version and platform coverage in the world. It supports the Java versions from 1.4 to 8 and runs on 7 CPU architectures (x86, x86_64, SPARC, PowerPC, Itanium, z/Arch and PA-RISC) under 7 different operating systems (OS X, Windows, Solaris, Linux, AIX, as400 and HP/UX). It uniquely supports the same configuration, behavior, extensions, analysis tools and supportability features on all these overall 15 platforms.

As an introduction, this talk will motivate the reasons behind our decision to build and support an own JDK and describe our development model in between the commercial sources we've licensed from Oracle and the OpenJDK project. Following that, our main features like "Debugging on Demand" (i.e. start debugging your application without the need to restart it), "Cloud Debugging" (i.e. debug your cloud application without any performance or latency problems, be it on your host or on a remote server in the cloud) and our "SAP JVM Profiler" which can be attached on-demand without VM configuration will be demonstrated. Apart from that you'll also hear about various smaller productivity features for developers like CPU, memory and I/O traces, extended thread dumps and extended exception messages for critical Java exceptions like for example NullPointer- or ClassCastExceptions.

The talk will also offer some insights into the implementation details of the before mentioned features. While the SAP JVM is a commercially licensed JDK only available to SAP customers, you can still get a trial version here.

Speaker Bio

​Volker Simonis works for SAP in the SAP JVM Technology group. OpenJDK contributor from the very beginning and helped SAP and the SAP JVM team engage in the OpenJDK project. Project lead of the OpenJDK PowerPC/AIX porting project, a JDK8 committer and JDK9 reviewer.