Discuss: New project: AArch64

[Andrew Haley]

I intend to propose the creation of the "AArch64 Port" Project with me,
Andrew Haley, as the Lead and the Porters Group as the sponsoring
Group.

The goal of the project will be to provide a full-featured and
certified version of OpenJDK on the Linux/AArch64 platform which can
be integrated into the main OpenJDK branch.  AArch64 is the 64-bit
mode of ARMv8 [3]; it is a completely new architecture, and is not
compatible with the 32-bit ARM instruction set.  We hope that this
project will eventually be able to support operating systems other
than Linux, and will welcome contributors with the necessary
expertise.

We (Red Hat) already have a template interpreter.  We have also
written a functional simulator that is linked to the Java VM.  This
simulator features debugging support integrated with GDB and has a
full set of trace and breakpoint commands.  Real AArch64 hardware is
not yet available, but anyone with a x86_64 based Linux system will be
able to run and test the AArch64 JDK.

This implementation is based on JDK 8.

The next steps in the project are:

* Write a C1 compiler.
* Write a C2 compiler.
* Run on real hardware.

As an intermediate step, it may be useful to run on simulators other
than our own.

Followed ultimately by:

* Merge into JDK 8.

The initial committer will be:
Andrew Dinn.

We will, of course, welcome contributions from anyone with cycles to
spare.

Andrew.