Investigate NestedVM

NestedVM is a tool for translating MIPS binaries to Java bytecode. This can represent a migration path for C/C++ programs to the JVM by compiling the original program sources with GCC to MIPS and then translating the binary with NestedVM to Java bytecode. There are many tools written in C not available in Java which are needed by JNode and could be used via this method. Several examples: FreeType (already translated by the VEXI team), NASM, mkisofs, various archiving tools etc.
You can read more about NestedVM here: http://nestedvm.ibex.org/, its Darcs repository is here: http://darcs.brianweb.net/nestedvm/, two related posts are here: http://www.jnode.org/node/2709 and here: http://www.jnode.org/node/2359 .

The task involves the setup of NestedVM and related tools, the translation of a useful tool to Java and the evaluation/testing of the created Java bytecode under JNode.