Hardware support in JNode

As Levente points out, the process for porting JNode to a new hardware is "well understood". The problem (of course) is that it is a lot of work, and would require someone with considerable skills in writing compilers, assembly language cores and so on. And this is not just a one-time cost because the JNode port would then need to be maintained.

We have to balance the effort/resources needed to create and maintain a JNode port against the effort/resources needed to do other tasks aimed at making JNode more usable on the x86 platform. The current active developer group is concentrating on the latter. IMO, this is the right thing to do. It is better to have JNode run fast with lots of functionality on the x86 platform (that 95+% of people use) rather than have it run slowly with less functionality on a wide range of platforms.

But, hey, if someone (or some company) with the right skills were to commit to creating and maintaining a JNode port to (say) PowerPC, I'm sure we'd be very supportive.

The JNode architecture is suitable for supporting more platforms and we could provide technical support for developers interested in porting JNode to new platforms.

Here is an abstract of what porting involves: http://www.jnode.org/node/512