Today we are announcing the general availability of Liberica JDK’s three brand-new versions: 8u262, 11.0.8, and 14.0.2. These three releases contain, in total, 765 backports of fixes that address known functional issues (six of them are the backports of BellSoft commits) and incorporate 11 common security vulnerabilities and exposures.
In addition to these enhancements, the releases are packed with the following exciting new features from the BellSoft team:
1. Alpine Linux musl support added for Liberica JDK 8.
Previously, support for musl-based Alpine Linux was only available on Liberica JDK 11 and 14. We added a backport for JDK 8 with this release, as there are so many companies and developers using JDK 8 in production and eager to leverage Alpine Linux for its resource efficiency and simplicity. This feature will enable users to trim down Docker containers’ size and keep their environment as small and efficient as possible.
2. Javapackager added for Liberica JDK 8 and 11.
A feature in OpenJFX, which is now being re-engineered by the OpenJDK community as the jdk.incubator.jpackage module, was made available for Liberica JDK 8 and 11.
It allows installing and uninstalling Java applications in a manner that is suitable for a specific platform (whether they are msi and exe formats on Windows, deb and rpm on Linux, or pkg and dmg on macOS), and distributing them in a user-friendly way. With Javapackager being added, our users can now build application images, bundle them with the runtime as a single package, and reduce the installation requirements.
3. Liberica JDK 8 with JDK Flight Recorder is available.
JDK Flight Recorder (JFR) is a low-overhead JVM metrics collection framework for troubleshooting Java applications and the HotSpot JVM. This performance/diagnostic tool can be a huge time saver for Java engineers who need insights into how their applications perform while troubleshooting them at runtime. Being backported to OpenJDK 8 during the last year, it surely became one of the most wanted features. The backport will become generally available in autumn, but we decided to create a preview of this release in July for the early birds!
To use Liberica Mission Control with JFR in JDK 8u262, you need to use the Early Access binaries for LMC 7.1.2 with version detection patch JMC-6554 available here:
- bellsoft-lmc7.1.2-ea-linux-amd64.tar.gz
- bellsoft-lmc7.1.2-ea-macos-amd64.zip
- bellsoft-lmc7.1.2-ea-windows-amd64.zip
and the Liberica JDK binaries from here:
- bellsoft-jdk8u262+10-windows-amd64-jfr.msi
- bellsoft-jdk8u262+10-windows-amd64-jfr.zip
- bellsoft-jdk8u262+10-windows-amd64-full-jfr.msi
- bellsoft-jdk8u262+10-windows-amd64-full-jfr.zip
- bellsoft-jdk8u262+10-linux-amd64-jfr.deb
- bellsoft-jdk8u262+10-linux-amd64-jfr.rpm
- bellsoft-jdk8u262+10-linux-amd64-jfr.tar.gz
- bellsoft-jdk8u262+10-linux-amd64-full-jfr.deb
- bellsoft-jdk8u262+10-linux-amd64-full-jfr.rpm
- bellsoft-jdk8u262+10-linux-amd64-full-jfr.tar.gz
4. Liberica 11 for AArch64 now contains the Full bundle that includes Liberica FX.
In the previous versions, AArch64 support for LibericaFX was limited to Liberica 14. Starting from the 11.0.8 release, Liberica 11 for AArch64 now contains the Full bundle, including Liberica FX. This way, users that are programming on JDK 11 can now launch JavaFX applications on the AArch64-based OSes on SBCs like Raspberry Pi and stay on the LTS version of Liberica.
With these new releases, we deliver upon our commitment to enabling more performance with less hassle and administration. Hope you will enjoy them!
All builds are ready for download here.
