AIX and OpenJDK

[Alan Bateman]

On 31/01/2012 10:49, Steve Poole wrote:
>
> hi all,
>
> Last year  there was a discussion [1] about adding AIX platform 
> support into OpenJDK. I'd like to pick up that conversation and 
> complete this work.
>
> To recap  the salient points of the thread:
>
> 1: The scale of the changes to support  AIX without Hotspot are small  
> ( ~ 300 LOC)   There are  an additional 19 new files that cover  AIX  
> specific build files and providing  necessary support for  AIX 
> specific filesystem, virtual machine  and  process attributes  in the 
> same manner as is already done for Linux, Solaris and Windows etc. 
> Generally the changes have been coded as capability based rather than 
> platform focused. These changes are easy to understand and help 
> towards improving platform portability.
>
> 2:  Generally AIX is very close to both Linux and Solaris. As you 
> would expect we will help ensure OpenJDK developers do not break 
> things where they do not have access to an AIX machine.
>
> 3: This work will faciliate the porting of  Hotspot to AIX  but IBM 
> intends to focus on our own JVM at this time (as you would imagine). 
> We will make a binary of the JVM available for OpenJDK developers  who 
> want early access on AIX of ongoing work in JDK8 and AIX.
>
> I said I would post more when all  the changes under item 2 above had 
> been posted.  That's  basically  now.  I'd like to pick up the 
> conversation again and resolve  how to get the remaining files into 
> OpenJDK so it's possible to  build and run JDK 8  on AIX.
>
>  I do not consider that the scale of these changes warrant a porting 
> project all of their own.  Does anyone have a reason why I shouldn't  
> just start posting the additional files with the intention of getting 
> them added into the main JDK8 repos?
>
> Steve
>
Steve - in the thread that you cited then I was the one that suggested a 
porting project as a possible route. I still think this is the good 
approach as it would allow a complete port to be stabilized before going 
into the master. The Mac port will be moving into the mainline soon and 
is a good example (along the BSD project from where it started) that 
these projects can get into the mainline.

 From your mail then clearly the VM is the problem. I'm curious if 
you've looked at Zero? I don't have experience with it but it should 
simplify greatly the effort to get a VM going. Maybe folks with 
experience with Zero could jump in to give some indication of the effort 
required to build to a new architecture/OS. It may involve some work but 
it would mean that everything is built from source (as opposed to using 
a binary plug as you suggest).

-Alan.