State of the nation

[Volker Simonis]

Hi everybody,

I think you all understand that the long silence on this list was just
a sign of how hard we were working on the s390 port :)

Today I'm happy to announce that we've just reached a first milestone.
With the patch queue [1,2] from:

http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~simonis/webrevs/2016/s390x_patch_queue/

applied to the jdk9/hs repository from
(http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk9/hs/) the s390x port (including the
template interpreter plus the C1 and C2 JITs) can build/bootstrap
itself and run JVM98 in mixed mode.

While the port is mostly complete from a functional perspective, it
certainly still needs some cleanup and polishing. We also think that
we can still minimize some of the shared changes which are required by
now. We will keep on working on these topics within the next few
weeks.

I will also draft a new JEP for the integration of the port into jdk9
and post it within the next days.

Have a nice weekend,
Volker

[1] https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/MqExtension
[2] http://hgbook.red-bean.com/read/managing-change-with-mercurial-queues.html

PS: thanks to Goetz and David for doing the "8161259: Simplify
including platform files." change which will greatly simplify the
integration of ANY new port into the OpenJDK!

PPS: if you want to build the port yourself you currently have to use
the '--disable-hotspot-gtest' configuration option