AArch64: We have a release

[Andrew Haley]

We at the AArch64 Port Project are pleased to announce the first
release of OpenJDK on the Linux/AArch64 platform.  It is the first
implementation of the Java platform to be made available for this
processor architecture.

For those who haven't heard: AArch64 is the latest architecture from
ARM.  It is an entirely new instruction set, not compatible with the
earlier generation of 32-bit ARM processors, so we need a new OpenJDK
port for it.

This is a complete port, with template interpreter and client and
server JIT compilers.  We have JDK8 and JDK7 versions available for
download now.  It will shortly be included in Fedora for AArch64.
It is, of course, entirely free software, available under the GPL.

Source bundles are available from
http://icedtea.wildebeest.org/download/source/aarch64-port-jdk7u60-aarch64-831-b04.tar.xz
http://icedtea.wildebeest.org/download/source/aarch64-port-jdk8-aarch64-992-b128.tar.xz

We will now to make plans to integrate this port with the main OpenJDK
project.

Credit where credit is due:

We started this work at Red Hat almost two years ago with two Red Hat
engineers, Andrew Haley and Andrew Dinn.  It became an OpenJDK project
and we were joined by Linaro, who have been extremely helpful with
testing, bug fixing, and keeping up with OpenJDK's continuous updates.
Many people have helped, but in particular I'd like to thank Edward
Nevill for his support and tireless work.

Of course the work will go on: there is performance tuning to be done
on real hardware and we need to do a lot more real-world testing.  In
particular, we haven't yet done work to optimize HotSpot for the
Advanced SIMD and Cryptography units.  If you are interested in
working on this exciting project or if you just want to chat about it,
come over to aarch64-port-dev at openjdk.java.net .

Andrew Haley
OpenJDK AArch64 port Project Lead