[Question] Support JDK21 on SPARC?

[robmcgee-isw]

Hey,
Have you had any success patching and building JDK21 for SPARC yet?
We use Solaris 11.4 build and test agents on Jenkins CI, which will require us to upgrade our agents to use JDK17 or 21 to maintain support.
Solaris SPARC is the only OS holding us back from using the JDK21 option which has longer support so would be the preferred option.

Thanks for the builds!

[ptribble]

I'm a long way off getting to JDK21 on SPARC. The changes (virtual threads) are quite extensive, and it will certainly not be straightforward. Given the expected difficulty, and being currently unfunded, it's not a high priority right now.

For now, I would use JDK17, which does appear to work fairly well for this use case. I talked to the Jenkins team about this at FOSDEM, and their forward plan would be for JDK17 to be supported for another 2 years or so, which gives a little leeway.

I'll keep this open for visibility.

Thanks for opening the question, and for showing that interest exists.

[robmcgee-isw]

Good to know, thanks again.

[duttonw]

RFC for removing sparc builds out of idk: https://openjdk.org/jeps/381

When implemented: https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8272878

So from jdk18 onwards there is no easy backport of current Java onto this cpu architecture.

[robmcgee-isw]

So would it be correct to assume that Oracle don't even support it anymore?
I was unsure if buying OS support would get us an official build since there's no visibility on what package/updates are available behind the paywall.

[ptribble]

You can buy support for JDK11 on SPARC/Solaris from Oracle. But that's basically it, no later versions at all.