Now I’m back at work I can get down to some OpenJDK stuff in earnest. I grabbed myself the task of getting it up and running on the architectures that we support but Sun don’t.

The deal is that each processor that Sun supports has a JIT, and at the core of each JIT is an architecture description file, 10,000 lines or so of psuedo-assembler. Even one platform wouldn’t be an option for me, and I have five. But it turns out that Sun did an ia64 port way back when, and because ia64 assembler is wacky they wrote an interpreter in C++ instead. They dropped ia64 for Java 5, but the interpreter is still in the codebase and it looks like the build scripts can build it. Sort of. I mean, I guess it’s not been touched since 2004, but I live in hope.

Anyway, dwmw2 lent me a big old ppc64 box, so I’m trying to bootstrap OpenJDK on it. I’ll post some patches soon, probably Monday…