Service refresh 3

Service refresh 3

This release includes new operating system support, serviceability improvements, Oracle fixes, and IBM® fixes to the code base.

Support for offloading Java™ application processing to a graphics processing unit (GPU) on x86-64 systems (Linux® and Windows only)

Providing you meet certain hardware and software requirements, you can now offload Java application processing to a GPU on x86-64 systems.

For more information, see: GPU system requirements.

Changes to system requirements for offloading Java application processing to a graphics processing unit (GPU) on IBM POWER® systems (Linux only)

Support is added for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.2 on IBM POWER 8 systems with the Little Endian (LE) version of the SDK.

From this release, you must update your Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) software from CUDA 5.5 to the CUDA Toolkit 7.5.

For more information, see: GPU system requirements.

New operating system support for zEnterprise® Data Compression

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 for z Systems® is now a supported operating system for zEnterprise Data Compression. For more information, see Enabling hardware compression acceleration (AIX, Linux only).

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS support

Support is now included for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on x-86, IBM Little Endian Power Systems, and 64-bit IBM Z.

Changes to default settings for the IBM J9 virtual machine (z/OS® only)

When you run a 64-bit Java virtual machine (VM), compressed references are activated by default if the value of the -Xmx setting, which controls the maximum heap size, is at or below a specific threshold. In this release, the threshold value is increased from 25 GB to 57 GB when you have the APAR for OA49416 installed. The use of compressed references improves the performance of many applications because objects are smaller, resulting in less frequent garbage collection, and improved memory cache utilization. For more information, see: Compressed references in the OpenJ9 user documentation.

New -Xdump:suspendwith suboption for the -Xdump option syntax

You can now use -Xdump:suspendwith to modify the signal that is used to suspend VM threads while a dump is being written. For more information about this option, see the -Xdump option in the OpenJ9 user documentation.

Updates to the jdmpview tool

jdmpview is a command-line dump viewer tool that you can use to examine the contents of system dumps produced from the Java VM. This refresh provides the following updates to the jdmpview tool:

• You can now use the cmdfile command to run all of the commands in a file, line by line and sequentially. For more information about this command, see: jdmpview session parameters in the OpenJ9 user documentation.
• You can now use the history command to view your recent commands in the jdmpview tool. You can also specify and rerun a command from the command history. For more information about this feature, see: jdmpview session parameters in the OpenJ9 user documentation.
• You can now use the -append option to append new messages to the end of an existing -outfile when you run jdmpview in batch mode. For more information about this option, see: Starting in batch mode in the OpenJ9 user documentation.

Changes to the shared classes cache generation number

The format of classes that are stored in the shared classes cache is changed due to an Oracle security update. As a result, the shared cache generation number is changed, which causes the JVM to create a new shared classes cache, rather than re-creating or reusing an existing cache. To save space, all existing shared caches can be removed unless they are in use by an earlier release of IBM SDK, Java Technology Edition, Version 8. For more information about deleting a shared classes cache, see -Xshareclasses option in the OpenJ9 user documentation.

Service refresh 3 fix pack 10

This release contains support for the EPoll selector for Java Sockets over RDMA (JSOR), updates to the jdmpview tool, changes in behavior, and Oracle and IBM fixes to the code base.

Support for the EPoll selector for JSOR

When you enable JSOR, you can now use the -Dcom.ibm.nio.rdma.EPollSelectorProvider=[true|false] property to specify whether the EPoll selector is used instead of the default Poll selector. The EPoll selector increases the number of concurrent clients that are supported in Java client and server testing from 200 to 1000, and reduces latency in the channel selection process.

For more information about this property, see: -Dcom.ibm.nio.rdma.EPollSelectorProvider (Linux only). For more information about the current limitations of this property, see: JSOR limitations (Linux only).

Change in ORB initialization process

When the Object Request Broker (ORB) initializes, ORB property settings are processed in a particular order. The order of precedence is now changed. For more information, see ORB initialization. In addition, a new system property is available to set the absolute path to the ORB properties file. For more information about this property, see -Dcom.ibm.CORBA.ORBPropertyFilePath.

New charsFrom, charsTo, and tokens commands in the jdmpview tool

You can now use three new commands to specify, isolate, and display parts of the jdmpview tool output. Use charsFrom and charsTo to isolate specified words or characters on each resulting line, or use tokens to isolate specified tokens on each resulting line.

For more information, see: Processing output in the OpenJ9 user documentation.

Service refresh 3 fix pack 20

This release contains the latest IBM fixes and the October 2016 Oracle Critical Patch Update (CPU).

For more information about the Oracle CPU, see Critical Patch Updates, Security Alerts and Third Party Bulletin on the Oracle website.