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Dear all PowerPC users, |
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|
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I'm mulling over the idea of dropping Java on 32-bit ppc. Having |
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personally used Gentoo on this hardware myself in the past, I've |
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resisted the temptation to drop it sooner but I think it's time to |
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throw in the towel now. |
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|
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In actuality, it's ppc64 that's given me the most hassle but I |
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don't want to drop that as it still has a future, be it big endian or |
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little endian. Dropping ppc32 will allow me to spend more time on |
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ppc64, where I think it really matters, so I'm seeing this as a |
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positive step. |
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|
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ppc32 is the only arch we still support without a proper HotSpot port. |
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For Java 7, this leaves you with four options. |
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|
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1. icedtea with CACAO. Quite fast, less compatible, sometimes buggy. |
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2. icedtea with JamVM. Quite slow, less compatible, currently broken. |
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3. icedtea with the "zero" HotSpot variant. Compatible but REALLY SLOW. |
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4. IBM proprietary JVM. Quite fast, quite compatible, registration wall. |
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|
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#1 has long been the default and that's what icedtea-bin uses but that |
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is currently not and may never be an option for icedtea 3 (Java 8). This |
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is partly because CACAO isn't very actively maintained further upstream. |
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|
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Upstream icedtea, who are largely sponsored by Red Hat, have told me |
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that they're no longer spending any time on ppc32 because Fedora has |
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dropped support for it entirely. This means that Gentoo and Debian will |
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be the first to hit any issues, which is pretty rough. |
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|
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IBM's is probably the best of the bunch but the registration wall is |
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even more annoying than Oracle's restricted downloads. This is partly |
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why no one has ever bothered to keep the version in the tree up to |
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date. Bumping Oracle's is painful enough. I also told myself that I |
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wouldn't support any architecture based solely around a proprietary JVM |
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and I'm sticking by that. |
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|
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At the end of the day, it's not the JVM that's the biggest time sink |
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but testing the various Java packages on yet another architecture. For |
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thorough testing, you can multiply that by the number of major versions |
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of each JVM as well! If Gentoo can limit itself purely to HotSpot then |
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you can then at least be reasonably sure that a successful build on one |
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architecture should also work on the others. Both CACAO and IBM muddy |
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that situation. |
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|
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The straw that broke the camel's back on this occasion was a race |
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condition occurring in ECJ while building gnu-classpath under icedtea. |
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It appears to be yet another issue with CACAO. Race conditions are a |
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bitch and I just don't have the energy to track this one down any |
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further. I could just drop keywords around gnu-classpath or deal with |
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it some other way but this issue lowers my confidence in CACAO as a |
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whole. |
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|
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So please let me know if you have been using Java on this platform. I |
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did wonder whether we had any users at all but one has spoken up in |
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#gentoo-powerpc. I told them that they could manually download IBM's |
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JVM to run their single application jar and they were happy with that. |
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If that's all you need Java for then I hope you will find that |
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satisfactory. I could be persuaded to keep the ~ppc keyword in icedtea |
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but you'll need to speak up now. I won't be keeping keywords in the |
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Java virtuals as that would imply a level of support that isn't really |
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there. |
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|
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There are probably some packages that aren't typically associated with |
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Java that will be affected by this. I haven't made a list but I suspect |
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it doesn't contain anything majorly important. Thankfully LibreOffice |
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no longer has a hard dependency on Java. |
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|
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Regards, |
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-- |
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James Le Cuirot (chewi) |
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Gentoo Linux Developer |