adding a new ISA

[Venkatachalam, Vasanth]

Apologies for the cross-posting, but I thought this would get a wider audience on hotspot-dev...

Modifying the JVM to support a new ISA (such as the GPU) would require extensive changes.
I was wondering what people's thoughts were on the following:


1)      What guidelines do people use for deciding which components of the JVM to start modifying or writing code for? It seems like a good guideline would be to start with the changes that are the most straightforward, such as register definitions or the assembler. Do people have other ideas?

2)      How do people incrementally test components that depend upon the rest of the software which isn't in place yet? For example, if you update the register allocator and nothing else, how would you test this change without having the rest of the JVM in place?

Vasanth

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Vasanth Venkatachalam
AMD Runtimes
(512)602-6177