apple1 yellow-dog-linux orion ppc on G5

architecture: linux/ppc64
date: 10/26/05
contributor: Joe Kenny

Machine description:
Apple Xserve G5
dual 2.0GHz G5 (PPC970FX, altivec)
Yellow Dog Linux 4.0
Linux apple1 2.6.13.4 #1 SMP Thu Oct 20 21:48:41 MDT 2005 ppc64 ppc64 ppc64 GNU/Linux

It seems that there is no JDK available with this distro. I ended up using j2sdk-1.3.1-02c-FCS-linux-ppc.bin from blackdown.org. Blackdown does not have a JDK 1.4 version for ppc, and this caused babel issues later on. Hacks on several scripts (javac, realpath) were required to get "ppc64" recognized (and avoid "Can't find libjava.so" errors):

case "`uname -m`" in
i3-786 | ia32 | ia64)
proc=i386
;;
sparc*)
proc=sparc
;;
ppc64*)
proc=ppc
;;
*)
proc="`uname -m`"
;;
esac

The JIT freaks out on the G5, so this must be turned off (see http://ozlabs.org/pipermail/linuxppc-dev/2004-August/017521.html):

$ export JAVA_COMPILER=NONE

javac should now work and babel configure will succeed but the compilation will die complaining about calls to URLEncoder.encode(). This looks to be a JDK 1.3/1.4 issue, requiring the second argument to calls to encode() to be deleted. One or two similar hacks may have been required to back-port Babel to JDK 1.3 (really not much effort).

At this point I was able to build a working cca toolchain.

I learned of the JAVA_COMPILER issue AFTER failing attemps to build with a JDK 1.4 downloaded directly from IBM's website. It's entirely possible that with this variable set, the IBM JDK can be used and many if not all of the above hacks are unnecessary.

Good night and good luck.