AdoptOpenJDK 16 Available

AdoptOpenJDK is happy to announce the immediate availability of AdoptOpenJDK 16. Binaries are available for download of OpenJDK and Eclipse OpenJ9 (with OpenJDK class libraries). As always, all binaries are available free of charge without usage restrictions on a wide range of platforms.

New and Noteworthy

Overview of Java 16

For a complete list of the enhancements (including ones that only impact developers of OpenJDK), see the JDK 16 overview over at OpenJDK.

AdoptOpenJDK for Alpine Linux With musl libc

Alpine Linux is a popular Linux distribution for container workloads because of its small footprint. Contrary to most other Linux distributions, Alpine Linux is not based on the C library created by the GNU project (usually referred to as “glibc”) but uses musl libc instead. So far, OpenJDK has not supported musl libc but only glibc. Therefore, we had to add the GNU C library to our container images based on Alpine Linux, which increased the container images’ size. With AdoptOpenJDK 16, this is no longer necessary. We now have separate variants of AdoptOpenJDK 16 that are purpose-built for musl libc that can be downloaded as a tarball and are also available as ready-made container images.

Removal of 10 Symantec Root Certificates

As part of the general distrust of Symantec root certificates, 10 of them have been removed from AdoptOpenJDK. For details, see the related issue over at the Mozilla Foundation.

One OpenJ9 for All Heap Sizes

So far, AdoptOpenJDK with Eclipse OpenJ9 came in two flavors: “normal” and “large heap” (sometimes called “XL”). The large heap variant was purpose-built for workloads with, well, large heaps. Thanks to recent improvements to OpenJ9, this distinction is no longer necessary. AdoptOpenJDK 16 with Eclipse OpenJ9 is available as a single build that automatically switches between the normal and large heap mode depending on the configured heap size (-Xmx switch). If the heap size is larger than 57 GB, it will automatically enable non-compressed references, which corresponds to the old large heap mode. On AIX and Linux with the metronome garbage collection policy (-Xgcpolicy:metronome), the threshold is at 25 GB instead of 57 GB. Next month, AdoptOpenJDK 8 and 11 with OpenJ9 will get the same capabilities.

Some users might have chosen to use the large heap variants even if their heap was not that large. They can get back that behavior by starting the VM with -Xnocompressedrefs. If you want to know more, see what the Eclipse OpenJ9 documentation has to say about compressed references.

Do you have questions or want to discuss this post? Hit us up on the AdoptOpenJDK Slack workspace!


Andreas Ahlenstorf

Posted by Andreas AhlenstorfIndividual AdoptOpenJDK community contributor

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