Evaluating the Performance of the Eclipse OpenJ9 JVM JIT Compiler on AArch64

The embedded computing market, which includes Internet-of-Things (IoT) and mobile computing devices, is a non-traditional computing market where computation resources are limited. Therefore, software, particularly the managed runtime, is required to be more compact and efficient than in a cloud/desktop-based environment. This paper focuses on porting the Eclipse OpenJ9 runtime, a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), built on top of Eclipse OMR, to a new environment while continuing to provide a generic runtime environment. The low-power AArch64 (ARMv8-A) platform is becoming the answer for resource constrained environments of embedded systems. We evaluate and validate the AArch64 implementation of OpenJ9’s Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler against more mature architectures currently available, namely x86-64. The evaluation reveals performance discrepancies and necessary improvements, beyond those that are already known. Our work is an effort to template new architectural support and allow others to follow our model. We provide a baseline for future research on OpenJ9, OMR and the JIT on the AArch64 platform and outline some improvements as future work.