Supporting illumos (related to JEP-362)

[Peter Tribble]

The illumos project is a continuation of the OpenSolaris project. It
has an active community, has a number of distributions, and a number
of commercial companies use it as the basis for their products.

Currently, illumos uses the Solaris port of OpenJDK, which mostly
works because Solaris and illumos share a common heritage.

The recent JEP 362 (https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/362) impacts
illumos, as OpenJDK currently classes us as a Solaris port.

Prompted by JEP 362, we would like to see the creation of an illumos
porting project, distinct from the Solaris port. There's still work to
be done on defining that project and establishing its context - more
below.

One difference is that illumos ports tend to use gcc, rather than the
Studio compilers. This should make illumos much closer to the Linux
and BSD ports.

Separating illumos from Solaris also has a precedent in the Go project,
where the recent Go 1.13 release recognized illumos as a separate (but
related) platform.

If others wish to see Solaris support within OpenJDK continue, we're
happy to work with that. It still makes sense to regard Solaris and
illumos as different platforms, as both the platform and toolchain
have diverged from their shared ancestry.

One possibility I can see would be for the community to support the
GCC toolchain for the Solaris port rather than Studio. That would be
very similar to an illumos port.

Likewise, illumos still supports the SPARC architecture. If SPARC
support was retained for other operating systems, we would be happy to
collaborate on that. Supporting SPARC is not something we could do on
our own, though, and it wouldn't be a primary focus for us.

At this point we're interested in what other proposals there might be
to respond to JEP 362, so that we can ensure that the illumos proposal
does not unnecessarily overlap or conflict with other work. I'm currently
driving this within illumos, and am happy to engage with others to ensure
a successful outcome.

Thank you!

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/