Hitchhiker's Guide to Openbsd

Building the Sun JDK
Due to Sun's restrictive SCSL license, OpenBSD cannot ship binary packages for the JDK < 1.7. 
Starting from 1.7 OpenBSD has a fully GPLv2 licensed port, that can be installed as a package. Users 
looking for the browser plugin will still need to build 1.5 or 1.6 from ports until Sun releases the plugin 
code. Note that you will need plenty of RAM for this build to succeed. 
The JDK ports are in the 
devel/jdk
subdirectory of the ports tree. You can choose among different 
versions, each in their own subdirectory. When you just type 
make
, you will see a message asking you 
to to fetch the source files manually from Sun's website. Before you can do that, you need to register on 
that website, and agree with the license. That's why the ports framework cannot start the download 
automatically. 
Once you have downloaded the necessary distribution files and patch sets, copy them to the 
/usr/
ports/distfiles
directory. You will also need to have X installed on your system. Start the build 
by issuing 
make
in the port's subdirectory. 
The JDK requires a working Java 2 compiler as a bootstrap to build. For this purpose, since OpenBSD 
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq8.html (5 of 20)9/4/2011 10:02:10 AM

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8 - General Questions
4.0, the port of JDK 1.5 uses kaffe, which allows JDK 1.5 to be used on both i386 and amd64 platforms, 
and reduces the build time considerably. 
Older versions of the JDK still require a Linux version of the JDK. Linux emulation on OpenBSD is 
restricted to i386 systems, and so these older JDK versions will build only on i386. The ports framework 
should take care of installing the necessary files and setting 
kern.emul.linux=1
. For more 
information, please read about Linux emulation in the 
compat_linux(8)
 manual page, and also 
FAQ 9 - 
Running Linux binaries on OpenBSD
. Note that this Linux emulation is only required during the build 
of the JDK, which results in a native OpenBSD JDK. You do not need Linux emulation to work with 
the native JDK. 
After many hours, the build will finish. Just continue with 
make install
to install the JDK. 
If you run into errors such as "Could not reserve enough space for object heap", try increasing your 
processes' memory limits using the shell's built-in 
ulimit
command, with the 
-d
flag.