The Linux/AArch64 port
Java Enhancement Proposal 237 (JEP 237) had a single goal of porting JDK 9 to Linux/AArch64. In order to understand what this means to us as Java 9 developers, let's talk a bit about hardware.
ARM is a British company that has been creating computing cores and architectures for over three decades. Their original name was Acorn RISC Machine (ARM), with RISC standing for Reduced Instruction Set Computing. Somewhere along the way, they changed their name to Advanced RISC Machine (ARM), and finally, to ARM Holdings or just ARM. They license their architectures to other companies. ARM reports that there have been over 100 billion ARM processors manufactured.
In late 2011, ARM came out with a new ARM architecture called ARMv8. This architecture included a 64-bit optional architecture called AArch64, which, as you would expect, came with a new instruction set. Here is an abbreviated list of AArch64 features:
- A64 instruction set:
- 31 general purpose 64-bit registers
- Dedicated zero...
