[aarch64-port-dev ] Fireside chat - Thursday 13th July

[Andrew Haley]

A follow-up with regard to the AArch64 jdk8u commit policy.

The policy for updates is that once a patch is known to be stable and
has received a decent amount of testing, it can be considered for
jdk8u.


With regard to bug fixes, here is the policy:

"Changes allowable within the Java SE 8 specification may still be
rejected for inclusion in OpenJDK 8 if the behavioral compatibility
risk is judged as too large. Behavioral compatibility concerns
implementation properties of the JDK. Clients of the JDK can knowingly
or unknowingly come to rely upon implementation-specification
behaviors not guaranteed by the specification and care should be taken
to not break such applications needlessly. In contrast, if a change is
appropriate for every other JDK release train, it is generally
appropriate for OpenJDK 8 too. Examples of such universal changes
include security fixes and time zone information updates.

"With the above caveats, bug fixes in JDK 9 that do not involve
specification changes have presumptive validity for OpenJDK 8. That
is, by default such fixes are assumed to be applicable to OpenJDK 8,
especially if having "soaked" in JDK 9 for a time without incident.

"As a general guideline, if a change is applicable to both JDK 9 and
OpenJDK 8, the change should be made in JDK 9 no later than the change
is made in OpenJDK 8."

[This policy is taken from http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk6/]

The rules for performance improvements are less clear.  I'm going to
regard missing intrinsics as bugs and allow them as long as they are
well-tested in JDK 9 without problems.  Note that we have had several
serious regressions due to buggy intrinsics, so we have to be certain
what we are doing is safe.

Is this clear enough?

-- 
Andrew Haley
Java Platform Lead Engineer
Red Hat UK Ltd. <https://www.redhat.com>
EAC8 43EB D3EF DB98 CC77 2FAD A5CD 6035 332F A671