Project proposal: RISC-V port

[Palmer Dabbelt]

[Sorry for the second email, it appears my SiFive email doesn't want to 
subscribe to porters-dev.]

RISC-V is an open standard ISA stewarded by the RISC-V foundation 
<http://riscv.org>.  With the recent release of glibc 2.27 we now have the full 
RISC-V software base released from the various upstream repositories, which 
means it's time to start moving forward with the rest of the software stack.  I 
ran into Erik at FOSDEM a few days ago and he suggested that we open up the 
discussion of an OpenJDK port for RISC-V.  While I'm not familiar with the 
RISC-V Java efforts, I did part of a Hotspot port (a bit of the template 
interpreter and much of C2) to Tilera's TilePro and TileGx architectures a few 
years ago so I know a bit about the OpenJDK internals.

In the RISC-V community we view Java as a very important missing component of 
the software ecosystem, so I was thrilled when Erik found me at FOSDMEM and 
suggested there was community interest in a port.  Unfortunately, I won't have 
time to properly help out with the port (I'm maintaining Linux, as well as 
co-maintaining binutils, GCC, and glibc).  That said, I'd be very happy to help 
out where I can.  I think a good way to move forward might be to:

* Create a project to own the RISC-V port, which is what this email is about.   
  I'm OK being the project lead, at least until we find someone who will have
* Clean up our libffi port and submit it upstream.  Stefan O'Rear is in the  
  process of submitting the port now, so it should all be moving smoothly soon.
  Submit patches for our Zero port.  While I didn't do the port I don't mind  
  cleaning it up and submitting it.  I've added Martin who was more involved  
  with the original port.  I think he's not working on RISC-V stuff now that  
  he's at Google, though.
* Move forward with a proper OpenJDK port, starting with the template  
  interpreter and eventually adding C2.  I'm not sure if C1 is actually  
  deprecated, but we decided not to bother with it at Tilera because it didn't  
  seem worth the extra effort at the time.  Of course, this would be up to  
  whomever is actually doing the work :).

There appears to be considerable community interest in a RISC-V OpenJDK port, 
so my hope is that while I don't have time to directly contribute much myself 
that we'll be able to get something sane up and running.  Interested users can 
test on QEMU, and we've recently announced a board (and associated beta program 
that provide free boards to open source developers) so there's some hardware to 
run on as well.

I'd like to request that the Porters Group sponsors this project with me as the 
lead.

Thanks!