Power PC Build

[Andrew John Hughes]

[ccing IcedTea list too]

2008/12/28 Greg Lewis <glewis at eyesbeyond.com>:
> G'day Eric,
>
> On Sat, Dec 27, 2008 at 11:12:33PM -0800, Eric Richardson wrote:
>> I was looking into OpenJDK and saw the bsd-port and zero assembly project
>> and thought It might be possible build jdk6 on PowerPC.  After looking at
>> the bsd-port list I started working on setting up my environment. I have a
>> G5 based Mac. Here is what I have done so far.
>

Note that the proprietary JDK6 isn't supported as a JDK for building
IcedTea.  IcedTea was originally created so that OpenJDK could be
built without proprietary build tools or plugs.  Both are still needed
with the JDK7 tree.  It's possible to build 6 without plugs now, but I
guess you can't build it without an existing copy of IcedTea.  Of
course, if there is some fix that makes the Mac OS JDK work for you in
building IcedTea, then we are open to patches.  But supporting
proprietary JDKs as build tools is not a primary goal of the project
(i.e. no-one's going to be testing it still works on a daily basis).
Your best option would be to try --with-openjdk as a build option.  I
know IcedTea7 won't work with a Sun JDK being used as the GCJ JDK at
present, as there are some fixes specific to header files and
differences between gjavah and javah from the JDK.

> Depending on what you want in terms of a JDK, it might be easier to try
> and port the zero assembler work to the current OpenJDK BSD port.  I'd
> like to do this, but I've not seen zero assembler separated out from the
> Iced Tea sources.  I believe you need libffi working to get it to work,
> but there are ports for this in MacPorts and in at least the FreeBSD
> ports system (I expect it to be in {Net,Open}BSD as well).
>

You do libffi for IcedTea's zero support.  Should you want to also try
Shark (the zero-assembler JIT support) sometime in the future, you
also need LLVM but this is still a work-in-progress, especially on
64-bit archs.

> CC'ing Gary Benson, the zero assembler author.  Gary, would it be
> possible to get the zero assembler support as a patch against the
> current OpenJDK 7 sources or could you point out the relevant parts
> of the Iced Tea source?
>

I guess you'll probably get a response from this from Gary tomorrow,
but my feeling would be that, while it would be possible to provide
zero separately, it's not going to be something that's possible to
support long term as Gary does his work primarily on GNU/Linux within
IcedTea.

The relevant bits are the ports subdirectory and a number of patches
from the patches subdirectory. You need to comb the Makefile.am a bit
to find these.

> The other option for getting OpenJDK on Mac OS X / PowerPC is to port
> the BSD support to Iced Tea.  Thats certainly doable, but I imagine its
> a bigger job.
>

IcedTea[7] (http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/icedtea) already has a
--with-project=bsd option for supporting using the BSD tree in place
of the main JDK7 tree.  It just needs testing.  I think supporting the
use of BSD as an alternate icedTea build is the better solution long
term.  All it really needs is someone will to try building on Mac
OS/BSD and to maintain it long-term by supplying us with patches.
No-one currently on the IcedTea team uses BSD or Mac OS X (AFAIK) but
we're certainly open to more contributors and to supporting more
platforms.  I'd much prefer this to forking zero support.  There are
also other features such as the web plugin, web start support, etc. in
IcedTea that may be useful for BSD and Mac OS X users.

>> Installed MacOSX 10.5
>> Installed XCode 3.1.2
>> Installed Fink 0.9.0
>> Installed Mercurial
>> Checked out icetea6 (hg clone http://...)
>> ./autogen.sh
>> ./configure
>>
>> gawk not found
>> apt-get install gawk
>>
>> checking for a GCJ JDK home directory...
>> configure: error: "A GCJ JDK home directory could not be found."
>>
>> ./configure --with-gcj-home=/Library/Java/Home --enable-zero=yes
>>
>> checking for eclipse-ecj.jar... no
>> configure: error: "A ECJ jar was not found."
>>
>> Next error waiting if I fix the above.
>> checking xalan2 jar... no
>> configure: error: "A xalan2 jar was not found."
>>
>> Before I go further, I thought I'd ask if this is going to work at all using
>> the JDK 5 that comes with MacOSX?
>> Any suggestions on how to proceed?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Eric
>
>>
>
>
> --
> Greg Lewis                          Email   : glewis at eyesbeyond.com
> Eyes Beyond                         Web     : http://www.eyesbeyond.com
> Information Technology              FreeBSD : glewis at FreeBSD.org
>
>



-- 
Andrew :-)

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