Page History

This page describes architectural decisions in the HotSpot VM PPC port. It explains extensions we made to shared code needed for PPC, but which might be also useful for other platforms.  Further it gives details of implementations in the PPC part.

Supported operating systems and processor implementations

AIX: The port supports AIX 5.3 and later. 

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Processor: The port supports only 64-bit PPC machines. It recognizes Power chips 5 through 7 and generates code optimized for these processors. So far, it lacks an instruction scheduler targeted to Power 6, which is an in-order issueing processor.

Interpreter and Compiler

The port is derived from a VM targeted towards server applications. Therefore it focuses on maximizing peak performance. Thus, it utilizes the high end C2 optimizing compiler of HotSpot.  As interpreter performance is less relevant for server applications, we use the C++ interpreter.

Supported HotSpot features

We support a wide range of basic functional flavors of the HotSpot VM. As of garbage collection, we support*

• The default GC.

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• Concurrent Mark and Sweep (-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC).

Support for G1 is also implemented, but we still test and fix issue.

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