JDK 7 and the PowerPC/AIX port

The PowerPC/AIX port supports JDK 7. This port was not integrated into the OpenJDK main line for a long time, but finally was integrated into the codeline for extended support maintained by RedHat. We will continue to do critical fixes in the PowerPC/Linux and PowerPC/AIX code base.

The port has successfully passed all the Java SE 7 Test Compatibility Kit (TCK) tests on SLES 11.1 Linux/PPC64 and AIX 5.3/PPC64.

The JDK 7 port supports the following parts of the OpenJDK:

	linux big endian	linux little endian	aix
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 5.3 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: We build and run the VM on SLES 10.3 with gcc 4.1.2, but support it on other Linux distributions, too. The little-endian Linux variant must be built with gcc 4.8. SAP does not do continuous tests for the little-endian variant.

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

Status (see also the main page of the port):

In 2016 the ppc-aix-port/jdk7u has been integrated into the main jdk7u code line.

In November 2015 we fixed 8139258 and 8139421 in the little-endian port.

In April 2015 we integrated JDK 7u79 into the repository. Also we fixed a bug 8078482 happening when throwing AbstractMethodErrors.

In January 2015 integrated JDK 7u75 and ported 8050807 to Aix.

In July 2014 we integrated JDK 7u60 into the repository. Alexander Smundak of Google contributed the port of the template interpreter for little-endian ppc.

In April 2014 we also integrated the little-endian ppc port done by Alexander Smundak of Google. This port not yet supports the template interpreter and must be built setting --with-jvm-interpreter=cpp.

In April 2014 we integrated the port of the template interpreter for the big-endian platforms.