Currently, Linux/Power distributions either come with no Java at all, or the users have to get a proprietary Java Development Kit (JDK) from IBM, Volker said. Or alternative implementations are used such as Harmony. But these implementations are outdated and/or are orders of magnitude slower than recent commercial JDKs, he said.
In his proposal, which was floated on an online OpenJDK discussion group, Volker said having OpenJDK on PowerPC would add the first weak memory architecture to OpenJDK, leading to fixes. “As we already know from past experience, this will unveil all kinds of intricate memory ordering problems. Moreover, adding AIX as a new Unix flavor to the set of supported operating systems will uncover numerous implicit assumptions and shortcuts inside the code base, which only hold true for Linux and Solaris. We strongly believe that fixing these issues will considerably increase the robustness and further portability of the OpenJDK.”