RFR (M): 8036767 PPC64: Support for little endian execution model

[David Holmes]

On 12/03/2014 9:19 AM, Alexander Smundak wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 3:51 PM, Vladimir Kozlov
> <vladimir.kozlov at oracle.com> wrote:
>> It would only help if you could do cross compilation to have both build
>> variants at the same place. Currently you can only build le variant on
>> ppc64le machine and vice versa. That is why, I think, David asked if we can
>> control what variant to build.
> Just to clarify the situation a bit: ppc64le is not a variant of ppc64. That is,
> an application compiled for the little-endian PowerPC64 does not "just run" on
> the big-endian PowerPC64 (albeit OS can have such feature, similar to the
> ability of the Linux running on x86_64 CPU to run 32-bit x86 applications).
> So ppc64le is a different architecture from ppc64.

I disagree with that classification for "architecture" and it seems at 
odds with the literature which describes the endian-ness selection as a 
"mode".

David
-----

>> I would like to see the changes based on Volker suggestion. We can compare
>> them and decide which way to go.
> Volker has the detailed suggestion here:
> http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/ppc-aix-port-dev/2014-March/001790.html
> and it involves additional Make variable and if statements in the
> platform makefile
>   where they are not supposed to be present.
>