OpenJDK Releases
The OpenJDK project ships new major releases twice a year. Usually the appearance of a new release ends support for its predecessor. To address longer lifecycle requirements for e.g. enterprise Java applications, every 3 years one of the releases is designated to be a long term service release (LTS) with an extended support period. For instance OpenJDK 11, released in 9/2018, and OpenJDK 17, released in 9/2021 are such LTS versions.
SapMachine follows this roadmap with its respective releases, i.e. SapMachine 11 and 17 being LTS.
New End of Life Dates for SapMachine LTS versions
SapMachine so far has only comitted to provide one year of support overlap between an LTS release and its successor LTS. However, driven by stakeholder demand, we'll extend the overlap period by another year.
Please find the new and the old dates in the table below.
Release |
General Availability |
End of Life (old) |
End of Life (new) |
SapMachine 11 |
09/2018 |
09/2022 |
09/2023 |
SapMachine 17 |
09/2021 |
09/2025 |
09/2026 |
These new dates match the lifecycle of
Oracle's Premier Support offering. You can find all SapMachine releases with their respective GA and EOL dates listed in the
Wiki.
SAP's Commitment to OpenJDK Update Releases
The OpenJDK project has quite a number of contributors with Oracle being the largest group. Oracle however is not contributing to public OpenJDK updates but does commercial maintenance releases in closed source. So, to provide an LTS model for the OpenJDK, other members of the community have to step in.
SAP is one of the vendors that shoulder the main burden of OpenJDK updates. We're currently co-leading the OpenJDK 11 updates project together with Red Hat. We try to fix all issues raised by our customers against SapMachine in the OpenJDK LTS releases. Further, we assure all issues fixed by Oracle in their LTS releases are also fixed in OpenJDK. This guarantees that any quarterly OpenJDK release has the same quality as the equivalent Oracle release. In general, OpenJDK even contains additional fixes. We also try to help occasional OpenJDK update contributors to get their fixes in.
SAP commits to these efforts in OpenJDK updates during the SapMachine LTS lifecycle.
Contact
Reach out to the author or contact the SapMachine team by
email. General questions regarding SAP Java Virtual Machine can also be addressed in the
Q&A Forum.
