PPC/AIX Port Status Update

[Volker Simonis]

Hi,

as you may have noticed, I've just pushed two changesets:

http://hg.openjdk.java.net/ppc-aix-port/jdk7u/hotspot/rev/1efaab66c81d
http://hg.openjdk.java.net/ppc-aix-port/jdk7u/jdk/rev/a06818b39f7c

which enable the VM to run JVM98 and bootstrap itself on AIX.

One bigger part which still doesn't work is AWT/Swing because of some
FontConfig issues. I don't think that there are really fundamental
problems there, but I just had no time to look into it until now.

If the nightly build will succeed today (still with the IBM J9
bootstrap JDK), I'll change the build to use the newly build version
as of tomorrow for bootstrapping. If that will be successful as well,
I'll tag the corresponding repository versions as 'ppc-aix-port-b02'
and upload a binary of that version for your convenience.

I'm currently also updating the README-ppc.html file with detailed AIX
build instructions. The new version should be under the
'ppc-aix-port-b02' tag as well.

At that point I'll kindly ask any interested party to verify our build
experience on as many different AIX-platfomrs as possible and to start
improving the class library part of the port:)

If everything runs smoothly we can then start thinking about syncing
with upstream (i.e. with the jdk7u master) which we haven't done for a
while now. I'd propose to wait until the current hsx24 downport (and
the corresponding class file change) is completed. This will hopefully
enable us to use the same HotSpot (from jdk7u) to run both JDK7 and
JDK8. Once we've verified that such a scenario is really working, I'd
apply for a JDK8 forest to finally satisfy the long-cherished wish of
some of the mailing list subscribers:)

Regards,
Volker

PS: Goetz is currently heavily working on the C2 JIT compiler port
which will be ready for submission soon...