I assume you are referring to "os::dll_locate_lib()". I'm sure that it is cross platform. While uncommon, it's not totally wrong to call a .so file a dynamically loaded library on a POSIX/UNIX platform.
What interests me the most: The developer is employed by Intel! These big, essential open source projects always have a myriad of developers employed by the Big Guns of Silicon Valley hacking away. Is the thinking that if Intel adds vectorization optimization to OpenJDK that it might help sell more chips? The connection looks so loose; I'm a bit surprised that some senior bean counters approved this expenditure!
They want their chips to beat AMD (which this might not help with) and ARM in Java benchmarks, so adding optimizations makes sense from a marketing perspective.
Why? this is pretty typical of them. They used to ship massive amounts of patches to various projects to make their CPUs look good as part of their Clear Linux project, although that seems to have stalled somewhat.
What interests me the most: The developer is employed by Intel! These big, essential open source projects always have a myriad of developers employed by the Big Guns of Silicon Valley hacking away. Is the thinking that if Intel adds vectorization optimization to OpenJDK that it might help sell more chips? The connection looks so loose; I'm a bit surprised that some senior bean counters approved this expenditure!