I was away all last week on a training course where I caught a cold despite sneaking off between labs for yoga breaks. Now I’m sat here feeling like death and trying to figure out where I left off.

Ok, where I left off was that I finally made enough stubs for the build to finish building Hotspot and to start failing on the class library instead. I had been about to throw myself into the class library failures, but I found out that ppc64 is not the sleek modern version of ppc but rather its fat ugly sister so I rearranged the build system to favour ppc instead.

It’s quite neat. There’s an environment variable, ARCH_DATA_MODEL, which allows 32-bit VMs to be built on amd64 and 64-bit VMs to be built on sparc. It flips ARCH — though not everywhere! — to i486 (on amd64 with ARCH_DATA_MODEL=32) and to sparcv9 (on sparc with ARCH_DATA_MODEL=64). I think it’s only used on Solaris at present, but the best bit for me is that there is no sparcv9 directory — it shares with sparc. I fixed it so ppc/ppc64 and s390/s390x do the same thing, so you’ll get a ppc64/s390x build if you set ARCH_DATA_MODEL=64 and a ppc/s390 build otherwise. So now I only have three sets of stubs to worry about, not five.