BSD port of OpenJDK

[Greg Lewis]

G'day all,

I believe Dalibor will shortly follow this up with an official proposal,
but I just wanted to give a broader overview of whats been happening
with merging the BSD patches into OpenJDK.

We've now completed all of the legal requirements to be able to merge the
bulk of the BSD patches in, although it will initially start as a separate
project of course.  There are a few smaller patches that will have to be
reimplemented, but nothing core to our support.

Briefly, here is some information about the BSD port:

. There has been a BSD port since 1.0, although the current set of
  changes can really only be traced to the SCSL based 1.2 port.
. We currently have support for FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and MacOS X
  and for the i386 and amd64 architectures.  There are preliminary patches
  for FreeBSD/sparc64 and I'm hoping the zero assembler patches will
  help us add support for other architectures :).
. The bulk of these changes have already been through compatibility
  testing, so we expect the code to be solid already.
. We've always tried to do our porting in a way that would add BSD
  support without impacting support for other operating systems, so
  I don't believe we'll have any impact on the Linux or Solaris support.

Anyway, I'm very excited we're finally at a point to be able to do this
and I hope this will be a valuable addition to the OpenJDK project.

I'd also feel remiss if I didn't at least mention the contributions of
Kurt Miller, Landon Fuller, Jung-uk Kim, Alexey Zelkin, Christos Zoulas
and many others who have worked on the BSD port over the years and the
support we've received from the FreeBSD Foundation.

-- 
Greg Lewis                          Email   : glewis at eyesbeyond.com
Eyes Beyond                         Web     : http://www.eyesbeyond.com
Information Technology              FreeBSD : glewis at FreeBSD.org