AIX and OpenJDK

[Steve Poole]

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

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