Background ========== The illumos project is a continuation of the OpenSolaris project. It has an active community, has a number of distributions, and a number of commercial companies use it as the basis for their products.
Currently, illumos uses the Solaris port of OpenJDK, which mostly works because Solaris and illumos share a common heritage. The recent JEP 362 (https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/362) impacts illumos, as OpenJDK currently classes us as a Solaris port. Proposal ======== Prompted by JEP 362, I would like to suggest the creation of an OpenJDK illumos porting project, distinct from the Solaris port. This port differs from the existing Solaris port in that it would use gcc, rather than the Studio compilers. This should make illumos much closer to the Linux and BSD ports. The work to use gcc (or to dissuade the build from wanting Studio) has already been done, and most illumos distributions (and pkgsrc) build their OpenJDK packages with gcc today. This port will only address the x64 architecture, as that is the primary architecture supported by the illumos project. This port would (largely) inherit the Solaris-specific source already in OpenJDK, modified as necessary for gcc. Separating illumos from Solaris also has a precedent in the Go project, where the recent Go 1.13 release recognized illumos as a separate (but related) platform. At the present time I'll be the contact person; a number of individuals and organization within the illumos community have offered support. If the Porters Group supports this proposal then we can put together a list of people with appropriate roles. Note ==== If others wish to see Solaris support within OpenJDK continue, we're happy to work with that. It still makes sense to regard Solaris and illumos as different platforms, as both the platform and toolchain have diverged from their shared ancestry. Likewise, illumos still supports the SPARC architecture. If SPARC support was retained for other operating systems, we would be happy to collaborate on that. Supporting SPARC is not something we could do on our own, though, and it wouldn't be a primary focus for us. Thanks! -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
