Purpose of the parameters XXMaxPermSize, vmargs, Xms and Xms in eclipse.ini, what do they do

Question

I was developing an App. I had to modify my eclipse.ini so I wanted to know the purpose and meaning of these parameters XXMaxPermSize, vmargs, Xms and Xms, in order to correctly use them. I am using eclipse 3.8 on ubuntu 14.04, with java 7.

--launcher.XXMaxPermSize
256m
--launcher.defaultAction
openFile
-vmargs
-Xms40m
-Xmx384m
-Dorg.eclipse.equinox.p2.reconciler.dropins.directory=/usr/share/eclipse/dropins

Answer 1

Like Greg says, everything after -vmargs are VM args which are supplied to the JVM when an application starts. -Xmx is the maximum heap size, -Xms is the initial heap size, and the launcher.XXMaxPermSize is presumably an argument to the eclipse executable. This increases the size of the permagen space. I suspect this argument only really works pre java 8, as permagen was eliminated in 8.