Help me to build openjdk on my machine

[Mike Swingler]

On Jul 12, 2011, at 2:25 PM, Maxim wrote:

> Am 12.07.2011 23:10, schrieb Gary Meyer:
> 
>> On Jul 12, 2011, at 1:54 PM, Maxim wrote:
>> 
>>> @Mike Swingler: Java until version 1.6 runs successfully on PPC. I'm
>>> sure Apple did its own PPC port, didn't it?
>> 
>> No.  Apple never had any 1.6 code that ran on PPC, only 1.5 code.
> 
> Sorry, I didn't express myself well - I surely meant 1.5, particulary
> its virtual machine because I was speaking about porting of hotspot to
> PPC arch. I'm pretty sure there is some low-level PPC code for that VM
> and the whole thing doesn't run in interpreted mode…

While there was a J2SE 5.0 PPC HotSpot, the work to port it to Java SE 6 was never done, and is even more diverged from the HotSpot in JDK7. The PPC HotSpot JIT is deeply intertwined with the J2SE 5.0 codebase, which I do not believe was ever released under an open source license. As such, we would not have the right to open source Oracle's J2SE 5.0 code for them. Additionally, that old HotSpot also contained lots of internal Mach SPI, and the design of the C1 client compiler changed fairly radically from J2SE 5.0 to Java SE 6 (or so I am told). Forward-porting this code to the modern JDK7 design could take several man years.

Even though it may be technically possible to de-tangle this code from the technical and legal problems around it, the Java team at Apple is focused on contributing to an OpenJDK for our current customers. We are not supporting Leopard due to other technical limitations (and therefore not supporting PPC), and have no intention to release questionably licensed, unbuildable, or untested code to the open source community.


On Jul 10, 2011, at 11:44 AM, Paul Hohensee wrote:

> Hi Max and John,
> 
> Afaik, there's no support for PPC in openjdk.  Oracle has a private port, however,
> for which the build framework exists in the open, which is why you can get a little
> way in the build process.

Perhaps it would be worth asking Oracle about their private port, which I'd guess is up-to-date with the current JDK7 HotSpot design.

Just a thought,
Mike Swingler
Java Engineering
Apple Inc.