Today we announce the general availability of Liberica JDK versions 8u282, 11.0.11, and 16.0.1. The stable quarterly CPU cadence allows rolling out urgent updates and bug fixes exactly when they’re needed. The three April releases cover two (CVE-2021-2161, CVE-2021-2163) common security vulnerabilities and exposures with eight (four in each LTS version) backports. The release contains 501 fixes overall (127 in JDK 8, 271 in JDK 11, and 103 in JDK 16).
The BellSoft team has also included the following enhancements with all the GA builds:
1. Windows AArch64 support
With this critical update of Liberica JDK, we introduce support for Windows AArch64 (ARM64) in the current 16.0.1 and LTS 11.0.11. This port is working with C1 & C2 JIT Compilers, and all garbage collectors: Serial, Parallel, G1, Shenandoah, ZGC. As for JFX, the newest releases support just Graphics and Controls modules for now, excluding Media and Webkit.
These screenshots demonstrate Liberica’s availability for development on this platform. The first is Netbeans 12 (major Java-based IDE) on Windows AArch64 running Liberica 16:
The second one features Recaf (written in JFX) on Windows AArch64 also running on the latest version of Liberica:
Once again, we’d like to express appreciation to Microsoft for their first massive JEP 388 introduced last month in JDK 16. Thanks to this port and own developments, BellSoft engineers managed to add ARM64 support in OpenJFX — proving our commitment to the OpenJDK community and consistent contribution of all changes to the JDK mainline branch.
2. Static size optimizations in Liberica Lite GA
Our January release introduced Early Access binaries for the Liberica Lite flavor, cut down in terms of static size. Now, these packages are becoming available for a wide audience. All have been reduced by 3–6 MB (which equals 5 to 14.7%). We at BellSoft believe that every little bit counts and each improvement makes working in the cloud or with Docker containers more efficient.
3. Dynamic size optimizations in Liberica Lite 11
Starting with this release, if your application runs with the G1 garbage collector, Liberica Lite 11 will return unused buffer memory to the operating system. Here we can show dynamic RSS size optimizations by running a Spring PetClinic sample project. You can observe an approximately 32% improvement in the figure below.
4. Regular Liberica NIK CPUs
Liberica Native Image Kit is to receive critical patch updates on par with Liberica JDK. They should come out on a quarterly basis nearly the same time as BellSoft’s Java runtimes are released. In order to discover specific components or check version availability, please use the updated manuals for BellSoft Product Discovery API that now features a REST NIK API section.
Upstream changes
Cryptographic protocols are evolving along with any other software. According to monthly scans by SSL Pulse, more than 99% of the 150,000 most popular websites support TLS 1.2, which implies that 1% only support TLS 1.0 and/or 1.1. Since April 2021, they have been disabled in OpenJDK and Liberica JDK by default.
In case your application or used frameworks rely on these weaker protocols, it’s really time you moved to more modern versions of TLS, well supported by the JDK. Versions 1.0 and 1.1 are officially considered outdated and potentially endangering your critical Java applications. We recommend switching to TLS 1.2 or 1.3 as soon as possible. Until you’re done with this migration, it is still possible to enable older protocols by removing “TLSv1” and/or “TLSv1.1” from the jdk.tls.disabledAlgorithms property in the java.security configuration file of the distribution.
-jdk.tls.disabledAlgorithms=SSLv3, RC4, DES, MD5withRSA, DH keySize < 1024, \
- EC keySize < 224, 3DES_EDE_CBC, anon, NULL
+jdk.tls.disabledAlgorithms=SSLv3, TLSv1, TLSv1.1, RC4, DES, MD5withRSA, \
+ DH keySize < 1024, EC keySize < 224, 3DES_EDE_CBC, anon, NULL
Being close-knit with the community helps us stay on top of the latest JDK trends. BellSoft is committed to delivering only the most useful features and contributing to your Java apps’ efficiency.
Download all the new builds by clicking here or the button below.
