Hotspot versions for IcedTea6

[Dr Andrew John Hughes]

On 07:44 Tue 29 Mar     , Florian Weimer wrote:
> I fear I'm about to inherit an OpenJDK distribution.  

Why do you fear this? I would have thought this was a good thing.
What is it replacing?

> It is based on
> IcedTea 1.8.3 and identifies itself as:
> 
> java version "1.6.0_18"
> OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.8.3) (6b18-1.8.3-2~lenny1)
> OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 16.0-b13, mixed mode)
> 
> Does "16.0-b13" refer to the Hotspot version?  Is this the recommended
> version to use with IcedTea 1.8.3?
> 

It's IcedTea6 1.8.3 which is very outdated and has known security issues.
The latest in the 1.8.x series is 1.8.7, released on the 15th of February, 2011.
The latest version of IcedTea6 generally is 1.10.0, soon to be replaced by
1.10.1 on the 4th of April.

The default HotSpot for the 1.8.x series is hs14.  hs16 is available as an
option but is not the default.  For the 1.9.x series, the default is hs17,
while for 1.10.x, it's hs19.  hs20 is currently the default in HEAD and so
will be in the 1.11.x series, due for release this summer.

> I'm asking because we've experienced some instability with that
> version.  There appears to be a GC bug somewhere (we still lack a
> convenient reproducer for it, unfortunately), and their appears to be
> some miscompilation related to java.lang.String intrinsics (we still
> need to reduce the reproducer for it, but at least we can reproduce
> this one out of production).
> 

I would suggest updating to a newer version or, at least a version of the 1.8.x
series with security updates.

> -- 
> Florian Weimer                <fweimer at bfk.de>
> BFK edv-consulting GmbH       http://www.bfk.de/
> Kriegsstraße 100              tel: +49-721-96201-1
> D-76133 Karlsruhe             fax: +49-721-96201-99

-- 
Andrew :)

Free Java Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)

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