JDK 8 and the PowerPC/AIX port

JDK 8 includes the PowerPC/AIX port.

The port has successfully passed all the Java SE 8 Test Compatibility Kit (TCK) tests on Fedora 19 Linux/PPC64 and AIX 7.1/PPC64. This means that our port is fully compliant with the Java SE 8 specification on the named platforms.

Development of the port in JDK 8 is finished. We are still fixing issues of the port, but do no more downport new features. For example, the C1 compiler port will not be integrated to jdk8u.

The JDK 8 port supports the following parts of the OpenJDK:

	linux big endian	linux little endian	aix big endian
cpp interpreter	no more maintained	no more maintained	no more maintained
template interpreter	yes	yes	yes
C1 compiler	no	no	no
C2 compiler	yes	yes	yes

Supported operating systems and processor implementations

AIX: The port supports AIX 7.1 and later. It is tested to be built with xlC 12. Patch level 12.01.0000.0008 or higher is required. We do not support iSeries PASE.

Linux ppc64: We build and run the VM on SLES 11.3 with gcc 4.8.5, but support it on other Linux distributions, too. Up to jdk8u update 112 we built on SLES 10.3 with gcc 4.1.2.

Linux ppc64le: The little-endian Linux variants must be built with gcc 4.8 on SLES 12.1. SAP does not do tests and builds of this platform.

Processor: The port supports only 64-bit PPC machines. It recognizes Power chips 5 through 8 and generates code optimized for these processors. It lacks an instruction scheduler targeted to Power 6, which is an in-order issueing processor.