Andrew Haley, Author at Red Hat Developer

I am the Lead Engineer of Red Hat's Java Platform team. We support Java for the entire company and we are responsible for Java Packages in Red Hat Enterprise LInux. I'm also a member of the OpenJDK Governing Board and I'm the Lead of the JDK 7 and AArch64-port projects.

Areas of Expertise

Compilers, virtual machines, operating systems.

How Red Hat ported OpenJDK to 64-bit Arm: A community history

By Andrew Haley February 1, 2021January 29, 2021

It has been quite a year for Arm Ltd., the firm that designs reduced instruction set computing (RISC) architectures for computer processors. The news that Arm-based computers will be important for the foreseeable future has even reached the mainstream media. At the end of 2019, Amazon Web Services announced Arm-based Graviton2 servers. In June 2020, Apple announced its plans to move Macintosh computers over to Apple silicon—which means Arm.

Continue reading How Red Hat ported OpenJDK to 64-bit Arm: A community history

OpenJDK 8 and 11: Still in safe hands

By Andrew Haley May 22, 2019May 22, 2019

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.

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Not all OpenJDK 12 builds include Shenandoah: Here’s why

By Andrew Haley April 19, 2019May 1, 2019

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

Oh! What is going on?

Continue reading “Not all OpenJDK 12 builds include Shenandoah: Here’s why”

The future of Java and OpenJDK updates without Oracle support

By Andrew Haley September 24, 2018May 1, 2019

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.

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OpenJDK, AArch64, and Fedora

By Andrew Haley September 19, 2013April 5, 2018

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”

Blog Articles

Andrew Haley

Java Platform Lead Engineer, Red Hat