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Updating from openJDK 11 LTS to openJDK 17 LTS

Updated by RSpace Support

It is the responsibility of the customer to ensure that software on their on-prem IT infrastructure is kept upto date, this includes system applications such as Tomcat and OpenJDK.
RSpace version 1.91 or later is required for OpenJDK 17 to work correctly. RSpace 1.91 and later is NOT compatible with OpenJDK 11.
OpenJDK 11 becomes End of Life in September 2023. Please ensure that you update OpenJDK to keep receiving OpenJDK security patches.

Before you start, please make sure you have the setenv.sh file setup. If you don't there is a high chance you are just using the default config which is /etc/default/tomcat9 If this is the case for you, then copy the contents of that file into /usr/share/tomcat9/bin/setenv.sh and then restart tomcat.

Install the java 17 package

sudo apt install openjdk-17-jre-headless

Modify the Setenv file

Before starting, gracefully stop the tomcat9 service. As a result, this will stop RSpace from running while you perform the steps below.

You will be working on this file /usr/share/tomcat9/bin/setenv.sh, please take a backup of the file before making the changes below. This is the location of the file on Ubuntu 20.04 / 22.04 running tomcat9. Open this file with your preferred text editor.

  1. Replace "JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-11-openjdk-amd64" at the top of that file with "JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-17-openjdk-amd64". If it's not already there, add the latter to the top of your file.
  2. There are certain values / flags inside the setenv.sh file that are no longer supported in Java 17. We used to use these when running RSpace on Java 11 so you'll need to remove them. Perform a search for the following flags and remove them if they are found inside the file.
    1. -XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled
    2. -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC
    3. -XX:MaxPermSize=256m
    Some customers may be running other non-supported flags, if tomcat fails to start because of another unsupported flag, systemctl will tell you the flag causing the issue when you perform a "sudo systemctl status tomcat9". If this is the case, remove the flag causing issues and try starting tomcat again.
  3. There is a file at "/usr/libexec/tomcat9/tomcat-locate-java.sh" that needs to be updated. Open this file in a text editor and add the following number to this line. Add the number 17, before the number 11 as seen in the example below.
     Before:  for java_version in 11 10 9 8
     After:  for java_version in 17 11 10 9 8

You can now start the tomcat service back up, monitor the systemctl status to make sure tomcat is starting correctly. After tomcat has started and RSpace is up, you can check your Java version by running this command:

sudo bash /usr/share/tomcat9/bin/version.sh

It should tell you that you're running Java (JVM) 17. With that, the update is complete. If you encounter any issues you can email support@researchspace.com for support - Make sure to provide all Catalina, Tomcat and RSpace logs.

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