AIX and OpenJDK

[Steve Poole]

On 31/01/2012 16:46, Alan Bateman wrote:
> 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.
I can see your point of view  but the amount of work to support AIX is 
much lower than that for Mac - so I don't see the need.  You obviously 
have some critieria in your head about port vs no port so I would be 
interested to understand that in more detail.

> 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).
To be honest Alan, I tried building Zero on windows and linux and it was 
not a great story (instructions are fairly limited) so I didn't try to 
build it on AIX.    Of course I don't have a problem with someone else 
giving it go!
>
> -Alan.
>