Merge of PPC port into IcedTea 2.x for OpenJDK 7

[Volker Simonis]

Hi Andrew,

nice to hear that we're finally getting consumed :)

We regularly build and test on boxes with IBM's Power 5,6 and 7 CPUs.
So on these machines there should be no problems. What other 64-bit
Power machines do you think of?

Recently, some folks from Servergy started to test our port on their
new e6500 CPUs. Monica Beckwith from Servergy will be at FOSDEM so I
hope we can have a chat there.

If you run a debug version of java with the "–XX:+Verbose" flag, the
VM will print the extra instructions it detected and it thinks are
available on your machine. In general we only use Power5 instructions
plus the one we detected. If you run on hardware older than Power5, we
may have to do some more probing, but we don't have such machines. If
you encounter any problems, please let us know.

Hope to see you at FOSDEM,
Volker


On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 7:34 PM, Andrew Hughes <gnu.andrew at redhat.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm just about done with a merge of the PPC port into our IcedTea
> 2.x tree which supports OpenJDK 7 (currently u60 b03). I'd like
> to enable the port by default, in preference to Zero, but I'm under
> the impression that not all PPC64 boxes will support it. Is there
> a way of detecting whether the processor can support the port,
> via the likes of /proc/cpuinfo or cpuid?
>
> Thanks for all your hard work on this. We're already seeing much
> faster results than when using Zero!
>
> Thanks,
> --
> Andrew :)
>
> Free Java Software Engineer
> Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)
>
> PGP Key: 248BDC07 (https://keys.indymedia.org/)
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>