Kafka Unrecognized VM option 'PrintGCDateStamps'

Question

I installed Kafka on a remote server, and when I tried to run

~/kafka/bin/zookeeper-server-start.sh ~/kafka/config/zookeeper.properties 

And I received an error

Unrecognized VM option 'PrintGCDateStamps' 

And the kafka server failed to start. This was not being run in a vm, and was being run directly on Ubuntu Server 16.04 with Java properly installed. Any way this can be corrected simply?

Answer 1

Actually, Kafka works fine with newer versions of Java. I had the same problem, and found an error in the kafka/bin/kafka-run-class.sh script, where the Java version was incorrectly parsed.

This line grabs too much of the version string:

JAVA_MAJOR_VERSION=$($JAVA -version 2>&1 | sed -E -n 's/.* version "([^.-]*).*"/\1/p') 

This makes the if [[ "$JAVA_MAJOR_VERSION" -ge "9" ]] condition fail to identify the correct Java version, and adds some unsupported GC options.

Changing the line above to this solved my problem:

JAVA_MAJOR_VERSION=$($JAVA -version 2>&1 | sed -E -n 's/.* version "([^.-]*).*/\1/p') 

I have reported this as an issue with Kafka. The issue can be found here: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-6855

EDIT: There is a committed fix for this: https://github.com/apache/kafka/commit/e9f86c3085fa8b65e77072389e0dd147b744f117