Java9 for Solaris X64

Question

Java 9 was released yesterday and I was eager to give it a spin through a test suite which happens to be on a Solaris x64 server. However, I cannot figure out how to download Java9 (JRE) for Solaris X64. Here's what it looks like for Java 9:

Here's what it looks like for Java 8:

According to this, Solaris x64 is a supported platform. But according to this, Solaris x64 is no longer a certified platform for Oracle Java. (the equivalent list for Java 8 is here)

I don't understand where this leaves me.

Questions:

• Is Oracle officially dropping support for Solaris x64? Has anything been communicated on this topic?
• I can actually download a perfect copy of Java 9 for Solaris x64 from Oracle's website, just by replacing sparcv9 with x64 in the URL. Is that safe to use for production purpose ? Would there be legal issues in using it?

UPDATE Jan 2019

Overview of various JDK distributions in relation to Solaris X64:

• Liberica, by BellSoft have support for Solaris X64 (and Solaris SPARC for that matter)

• AdoptOpenJDK seem to be dropping support for Solaris. For JDK8 they did in fact support Solaris but only on SPARC, not on Intel (odd choice). For later versions of the JDK there's no Solaris mentioned at all.

• Zulu, by Azul seem to focus exclusively on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux, but with a note to contact them if you are interested in Solaris.

• Amazon Corretto seem to focus exclusively on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux.

Answer 1

Form one of the release note for JDK9, it seems like that it doesn't have ISA specific directory and probably is the reason for the discripency that you notice:-

Remove Oracle Solaris ISA bin directories and links

On Oracle Solaris, the JDK and JRE no longer have an ISA (Instruction Specific Architecture) bin directory. The $JAVA_HOME/bin/sparcv9 and $JAVA_HOME/bin/amd64 directories, and the sym links in the directories, were present in JDK 8 to aid migration after 32-bit support was removed. Scripts or applications that rely on these locations should be updated to use $JAVA_HOME/bin.

Answer 2

The SmartOS community (ie. Illumos based so a OpenSolaris derivative) is actually working on JDK9/10/11 support in pkgsrc. As far as I know you should be able to use pkgsrc on Oracle Solaris. Jonathan Perkin (of Joyent / pkgsrc) has done excellent work and actually already got JDK 9 and 10 working in pkgsrc (JDK 11 is still WIP):

• https://github.com/joyent/pkgsrc-joyent/tree/master/openjdk9
• https://github.com/joyent/pkgsrc-joyent/tree/master/openjdk10
• https://github.com/joyent/pkgsrc-joyent/tree/master/openjdk11

Join the SmartOS user discussion mailing list in case your interested.

EDIT 26-07-2019:

There are also builds of OpenJDK in tarballs available here: http://pkgs.tribblix.org/openjdk/ . As far as I can tell these can be used on all Solaris and Illumos installs.