Recently the change "8046471: Use OPENJDK_TARGET_CPU_ARCH instead of legacy value for hotspot ARCH" was backporeted to jdk8u. It changes the ARCH value which is passed from the top-level configure to the hotspot make via the hotspot-spec.gmk file. For the ppc64 architecture this changes the reported value for ARCH from 'ppc64' to 'ppc'.

In jdk9 this is no problem, because the hotspot makefiles correctly handle this value. Unfortunately in jdk8u this is not the case, because the change "8072383: resolve conflicts between open and closed ports" hasn't been correctly downported from jdk9 to jdk8u before.

In jdk9 it contains the following lines:

- SRCARCH = $(ARCH/$(filter sparc sparc64 ia64 amd64 x86_64 arm ppc ppc64 aarch64 zero,$(ARCH)))
+ SRCARCH ?= $(ARCH/$(filter sparc sparc64 ia64 amd64 x86_64 ppc ppc64 aarch64 zero,$(ARCH)))

   ARCH/ppc64 = ppc
   ARCH/ppc = ppc
- ARCH/arm = arm
   ARCH/aarch64= aarch64

but in the downport this was for whatever reason changed to:

- SRCARCH = $(ARCH/$(filter sparc sparc64 ia64 amd64 x86_64 arm ppc ppc64 zero,$(ARCH)))
+ SRCARCH ?= $(ARCH/$(filter sparc sparc64 ia64 amd64 x86_64 ppc64 zero,$(ARCH)))

   ARCH/ppc64 = ppc
- ARCH/ppc = ppc
- ARCH/arm = arm
   ARCH/zero = zero

Notice how in jdk8u 'ppc' was removed from SRCARCH and how the line 'ARCH/ppc = ppc' was completely deleted in jdk8u.

We need to fix these two line in jdk8u in order to make the build work again on ppc64.