2010/12/15 - Apache Excalibur has been retired.

For more information, please explore the Attic.

Why Util Was Created

Util was created to enable us to find out how many processors are on a system programmatically. Unfortunately Sun does not think it is important to know these details through Java. The Thread Manager uses this to automatically determine how many background threads it wants in the backing ThreadPool.

When To Use Util

Usually you won't use this package directly, unless you want to know how many processors a system has. You might need to add a new CPU Parser that will find out the necessary information from environment variables or the /proc/ filesystem for a platform that is not currently supported.

Core Concepts

Util has a SystemUtil which will load the correct CPU Parser for your platform. If there is no maching CPU Parser will assume that there is only one processor for your system.

System Util

The System Util will allow you to gather any platform specific information. Some of the methods are simpler ways of accessing the System properties, and others are derived from the CPU Parser.

CPU Parser

The CPU Parser will allow you to gather essential information from your platform. Unfortunately we cannot assume there is only one way to gather information for each platform. If your platform is not supported directly, please send an email to the Avalon Users mailing list with the new CPU Parser attached. We should be able to include it in the next release. We currently support the entire Microsoft Windows suite that supports Java, and Linux. Since we don't currently have access to other machines, we can't support them yet.