We announced in January
that Jenkins would be upgrading its Java runtime dependency to Java 8 this
year. After a sizable amount of preparation, this week’s release of
Jenkins 2.54 is the first weekly release to require
a Java 8 runtime.
For users of the weekly release, this means that Jenkins 2.54 must have
a Java 8 runtime installed on the system in order to
run. Those using the
jenkinsci/jenkins:latest
Docker container won’t need to take any action, as the Java runtime environment
is already bundled in the container.
In addition to upgrading the Java Runtime Environment for the controller, any
connected agents must upgrade to a Java 8 runtime environment.
The Long-Term Support (LTS) release line however, has
not yet been updated to require Java 8. We are expecting the first LTS release
to require Java 8 in June.
Compatibility Notes
Using the Maven project type with Java 7
Users with jobs configured with the "Maven project" type may not be able to use
Java 7 for their Maven jobs. The correct behavior is not guaranteed so
proceed at your own risk. The Maven Project uses Jenkins Remoting to establish
"interceptors" within the Maven executable. Because of this, Maven uses
Remoting and other Jenkins core classes, and this behavior may break an update.
See also:
JENKINS-40990.
Java 9 compatibility
At this point, Jenkins does not yet support Java 9 development releases.
As always, if you have questions please ask on the
jenkinsci-users@ mailing list or
report
an issue in JIRA.
References
JVM statistics post back in November 2016.
Official announcement blog post.
Original JIRA ticket for this upgrade.
The 6 months, 82 messages, thread on the Jenkins developers mailing list
The announcement on the Jenkins users mailing list
The Pull request on Jenkins core