In 2018, Oracle announced that it would only provide free public updates and auto-updates of Java SE 8 for commercial users until the end of January 2019. Java 8 is a very important platform, used by millions of programmers, so this was a big deal. The Java community needed to fill the gap.
Continue reading “OpenJDK 8 and 11: Still in safe hands”
OpenJDK 12 is now out, and it has new features. These are:
189: Shenandoah: A Low-Pause-Time Garbage Collector (Experimental)
230: Microbenchmark Suite
325: Switch Expressions (Preview)
334: JVM Constants API
340: One AArch64 Port, Not Two
341: Default CDS Archives
344: Abortable Mixed Collections for G1
346: Promptly Return Unused Committed Memory from G1
When I follow the link from the OpenJDK 12 project page to the open source builds page, I see the downloadable binaries. I download the Linux binary and install it, then see if the first item on the feature list, Shenandoah, works:
$ ./jdk-12/bin/java -XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions -XX:+UseShenandoahGC -cp ~ Hello Error occurred during initialization of VM Option -XX:+UseShenandoahGC not supported
Continue reading “Not all OpenJDK 12 builds include Shenandoah: Here’s why”
Oracle recently announced that it would no longer supply free (as in beer) binary downloads for JDK releases after a six-month period, and neither would Oracle engineers write patches for OpenJDK bugs after that period. This has caused a great deal of concern among some Java users.
From my point of view, this is little more than business as usual. Several years ago, the OpenJDK 6 updates (jdk6u) project was relinquished by Oracle and I assumed leadership, and then the same happened with OpenJDK 7. Subsequently, Andrew Brygin of Azul took over the leadership of OpenJDK 6. The OpenJDK Vulnerability Group, with members from many organizations, collaborates on critical security issues. With the help of the wider OpenJDK community and my team at Red Hat, we have continued to provide updates for critical bugs and security vulnerabilities at regular intervals. I can see no reason why this process should not work in the same way for OpenJDK 8 and the next long-term support release, OpenJDK 11.
Continue reading “The future of Java and OpenJDK updates without Oracle support”
For the really impatient reader: OpenJDK for AArch64 on Fedora is now available. Skip to the end of this blog for information about how you can get it.
For everyone else:
This is the first of my AArch64 OpenJDK blogs. I’m the project lead of the AArch64 OpenJDK port, and I’ll be blogging here from time to time. There may not be many people reading this blog who don’t know what AArch64 is, but it’s the new 64-bit version of the wildly popular ARM processor. General availability of real AArch64 hardware isn’t going to be for a while yet, but we really want OpenJDK to be ready as soon as it is.
Oh, and OpenDK is the reference implementation – the gold standard – of the Java system and programming language.
We’ve been porting the OpenJDK implementation of Java to the new AArch64 processor architecture for a while now, and it’s starting to come together.
Continue reading “OpenJDK, AArch64, and Fedora”
