AIX and OpenJDK

[Phil Race]

On 1/31/2012 2:49 AM, 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.

There's a lot of UI choices we make that need to distinguish between 
Linux and Solaris,
often made on the basis of the "os.name" property
So I seriously doubt that it will even be possible to know what to do 
without being an AIX developer.
Do you have motif ? What version of X11? What's the printing story on 
AIX? What's the font
support? What window managers ? Etc. etc. etc.
Whilst you may be able to contribute the "status quo" what's to happen 
in the future.
At least for Solaris one can simply install the x86 version on any PC 
hardware you have lying
around and know that its identical to SPARC in all regards that matter 
to an app.
So I think unless we have guaranteed continual free access to AIX 
systems on x86 hardware
(does that exist?) that AIX can't be a proper port of the same stature 
as the others and
I would vote against it without at least all of the above being resolved.

-phil.



>
> 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
>
> [1]  
> http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/porters-dev/2011-October/000363.html
>