ocamlopt support for PPC64 little-endian

[vicuna]

Original bug ID: 6943
Reporter: @xavierleroy
Assigned to: @xavierleroy
Status: closed (set by @xavierleroy on 2017-02-16T14:16:41Z)
Resolution: fixed
Priority: normal
Severity: feature
Version: 4.03.0+dev / +beta1
Fixed in version: 4.03.0+dev / +beta1
Category: back end (clambda to assembly)
Related to: #6905

Bug description

A team at IBM would like to have the OCaml native-code compiler support the POWER8 architecture under Linux, both in little-endian and in big-endian modes. RedHat has a fork of OCaml that provides this support. The purpose of this PR is to track progress towards support in mainline OCaml.

Additional information

POWER8 / Linux in little-endian mode (ppc64le) is 64 bits, little-endian, ELF PPC64 ABI v2.
POWER8 / Linux in big-endian mode (ppc64) is 64 bits, big-endian, ELF PPC64 ABI v1.

[vicuna]

Comment author: @xavierleroy

Working code is in branch "ppc64" and described here: #225. What remains to be done is code review and some more testing on large, 3rd-party apps.

[vicuna]

Comment author: @xavierleroy

Merged in trunk, revision 16374.

[vicuna]

Comment author: @xavierleroy

Did some more testing on ppc64le with OPAM, Coq, and some OPAM packages. I'm reasonably confident in the new POWER back-end. Marking this PR as resolved.