On 31/01/2012 10:49, Steve Poole wrote:
hi all,
Last year there was a discussion [1] about adding AIX platform
support into OpenJDK. I'd like to pick up that conversation and
complete this work.
To recap the salient points of the thread:
1: The scale of the changes to support AIX without Hotspot are small
( ~ 300 LOC) There are an additional 19 new files that cover AIX
specific build files and providing necessary support for AIX
specific filesystem, virtual machine and process attributes in the
same manner as is already done for Linux, Solaris and Windows etc.
Generally the changes have been coded as capability based rather than
platform focused. These changes are easy to understand and help
towards improving platform portability.
2: Generally AIX is very close to both Linux and Solaris. As you
would expect we will help ensure OpenJDK developers do not break
things where they do not have access to an AIX machine.
3: This work will faciliate the porting of Hotspot to AIX but IBM
intends to focus on our own JVM at this time (as you would imagine).
We will make a binary of the JVM available for OpenJDK developers who
want early access on AIX of ongoing work in JDK8 and AIX.
I said I would post more when all the changes under item 2 above had
been posted. That's basically now. I'd like to pick up the
conversation again and resolve how to get the remaining files into
OpenJDK so it's possible to build and run JDK 8 on AIX.
I do not consider that the scale of these changes warrant a porting
project all of their own. Does anyone have a reason why I shouldn't
just start posting the additional files with the intention of getting
them added into the main JDK8 repos?
Steve
Steve - in the thread that you cited then I was the one that suggested a
porting project as a possible route. I still think this is the good
approach as it would allow a complete port to be stabilized before going
into the master. The Mac port will be moving into the mainline soon and
is a good example (along the BSD project from where it started) that
these projects can get into the mainline.
From your mail then clearly the VM is the problem. I'm curious if
you've looked at Zero? I don't have experience with it but it should
simplify greatly the effort to get a VM going. Maybe folks with
experience with Zero could jump in to give some indication of the effort
required to build to a new architecture/OS. It may involve some work but
it would mean that everything is built from source (as opposed to using
a binary plug as you suggest).
-Alan.
