GCJ on ppc

[Justin Hibbits]

Hi Greg,

On Jan 9, 2012, at 9:49 PM, Greg Lewis wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 08, 2012 at 02:58:32PM -0500, Super Bisquit wrote:
>> That's good news. Thanks.
>>
>> On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 7:37 PM, Justin Hibbits  
>> <chmeeedalf at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Well, guys, I don't know if anyone's tried this before, but GCJ and
>>> libjava both compile on FreeBSD/ppc.  I just tested this with  
>>> 4.6-20111111,
>>> and only compiled, haven't tried actually running anything built  
>>> with gcj.
>>> My goal in doing this was to see about getting LLVM's vmkit/J3  
>>> working on
>>> here, and this was the first step in doing so.  All it took to do  
>>> this was
>>> to add the line 'powerpc-*-*) ;;' at line 3144 (I can provide a  
>>> patch for
>>> the port later, these are just simple instructions to get it to  
>>> compile).
>>>
>>> Happy hacking, maybe we'll get a JVM on ppc soon.
>
> IIRC one should be able to get the openjdk7 port working on powerpc  
> with
> the Zero VM at least.  We've at one point had Zero working on both
> FreeBSD/amd64 and FreeBSD/sparc64 and it has previously worked on  
> Leopard/ppc
> at some point.  The big problem, as usual, is the bootstrapping.   
> I'll be the
> first to admit that is probably much easier with gcj.
>
> FWIW.
>
> -- 
> Greg Lewis                          Email   : glewis at eyesbeyond.com
> Eyes Beyond                         Web     : http:// 
> www.eyesbeyond.com
> Information Technology              FreeBSD : glewis at FreeBSD.org


Hadn't even considered openjdk, just going with vmkit as that's  
already known to work on Linux/ppc.  According to the IcedTea build  
requirements, a working JDK is required to build IcedTea, which makes  
it a chicken-and-egg problem.  So having vmkit, which should work on  
ppc now that gcj is building on ppc, should allow bootstrapping  
IcedTea as well.

- Justin