PowerPC JIT

[mthies at uni-paderborn.de]

> Is anyone working on PowerPC JIT for kaffe?

I have done a (so far) partly working port of PowerPC JIT for AIX
currently based on kaffe 0.8.0.

Exceptions are completely untested and I was investigating a bug
concerning the Sieve benchmark when other things took priority and
I had to (temporarily) suspend my work on it.

Otherwise the port should be complete (e.g. no missing code sequences)
and it successfully solves some unique problems concerning the
PowerPC architecture, e.g. function pointers do _NOT_ point to the
code of the function (but to a function descriptor), C-like parameter
passing can only be deduced starting with the leftmost parameter
(while kaffe passes them from right to left), ...

PowerPC on MkLinux or MachTen will require some adaptions to the
calling conventions and the stackframe layout used with these OSs.

If anybody wants to take over (or at least learn from any pitfalls I
have encountered so far), email me and I'll make my work available.

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 Michael Thies             | e-mail: mthies at uni-paderborn.de
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