Re: CFV: New Project: PowerPC/AIX Port

Vote: Yes

It's a very interesting project, I'll keep an eye on that!

Cheers,
Mario

2012/5/14 Simonis, Volker <volker.simonis@...>:
> I hereby propose the creation of the "PowerPC/AIX Port" Project with
> Volker Simonis as the Lead and the Porters Group as the sponsoring Group.
>
> The goal of the project will be to provide full-featured and certifiable
> version of the OpenJDK on the Linux/PowerPC and AIX/PowerPC platforms which can
> be ultimately integrated into the main OpenJDK development branch.
>
> Besides the very fact that this project will enrich the OpenJDK platform
> coverage with two new platforms we see two more main benefits. By supporting
> the PowerPC architecture we will add the first weak memory architecture to the
> OpenJDK. As we already know from past experience, this will unveil all kinds
> of intricate memory ordering problems. Moreover, adding AIX as a new Unix
> flavor to the set of supported operating systems will uncover numerous
> implicit assumptions and shortcuts inside the code base which only hold true
> for Linux and Solaris. We strongly believe that fixing these issues will
> considerably increase the robustness and further portability of the OpenJDK.
>
> The technical approach and a brief project agenda are as follows:
> - provide an interpreter-only version of HotSpot based on the
>  CPP interpreter on Linux/PPC64
> - provide a full set of tools and class libraries for AIX and
>  Linux on PPC32/64