There's actually an umbrella JIRA to track issues with JDK8 (HADOOP-11090), in case anyone missed it.
At LinkedIn we've been running our Hadoop 2.3 deployment on JDK8 for about a month now with some mixed results. It definitely works but there are issues, mostly around virtual memory exploding. The reason we took the jump early is there is a company wide push to move to JDK8 ASAP, I suspect this isn't something unique to LinkedIn. To get this to work with security enabled, we've had to apply patches not even in trunk yet because they break JDK6 compatibility. >From my perspective, based on what I've seen and people I've talked to, there is a huge push to move to JDK8 ASAP so it's becoming increasingly urgent to at least get support to run on JDK8. On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 9:55 AM, Allen Wittenauer <a...@altiscale.com> wrote: > > On Sep 17, 2014, at 2:47 AM, Steve Loughran <ste...@hortonworks.com> wrote: >> >> I don't agree. Certainly the stuff I got into Hadoop 2.5 nailed down the >> filesystem binding with more tests than ever before. > > FWIW, based upon my survey of JIRA, there are a lot of unit test > fixes that are only in trunk. > >> But I am also aware of large organisations that are still on Java 6. >> Giving a clear roadmap "move to Java 7 now, java 8 in "XX months" can help >> them plan. > > Planning is a big thing. That’s one of the reasons why it’d be > prudent to start doing 3.0+JDK8 now as well. Even if April slips, other > projects and orgs are already moving to 8. These people wonder what our > plans are so that they can run one JVM. Right now our answer is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . > > I’m sure I can dig up a user running Hadoop 0.13 because it ran on > JDK5. That doesn’t mean the open source project should stall because certain > orgs don’t/can't upgrade. > >>> >>> Drop the 2.6.0 release, branch trunk, and start rolling a >>> 3.0.0-alpha with JDK8 as the minimum. 2.5.1 becomes the base for all >>> sustaining work. This gives the rest of the community time to move to JDK8 >>> if they haven’t already. For downstream vendors, it gives a roadmap for >>> their customers who will be asking about JDK8 sooner rather than later. By >>> the time 3.0 stabilizes, we’re probably looking at April, which is perfect >>> timing. >>> >>> >> That delays getting stuff out too much; if april slips it becomes a long >> time since an ASF release came out. > > I’m assuming you specifically mean a ‘stable’ release. If, as > everyone seems to be saying, that 3.x doesn’t have that much different than > 2.x, doesn’t this mean that 3.x should be stable much quicker than 2.x took? > In other words, if 2.5 is stable and the biggest differences between it and > trunk is the majority of code (450+ JIRAs as of yesterday afternoon) that > just also happens to be in 2.6, doesn’t it mean 2.6 is also extremely > unstable? (Thus supporting my conjecture that 2.6 is going to be a > problematic release?) > >> Saying "you must run on Java 8 for >> this" will only scare people off and hold back adoption of 3.x, leaving 2.5 >> as the last release that ends up being used for a while; the new 1.0.4 > > From the outside, trunk looks a lot of 0.21 already. From what I can > tell, there is zero motivation to get it out the door and on a roadmap. > Primarily because there is little different between trunk and branch-2. This > is a very dangerous place to be as those few differences, some measured in > years old, rot and wither. :( > >> Here's an alternative >> >> -2.6 on java 6, announce EOL for Java 6 support >> -2.7 on Java 7, state that the lifespan of j7 support will be some bounded >> time period (12-18 mo) >> -trunk to build and test on Java 8 in jenkins alongside java 7. For that to >> be useful someone needs to volunteer to care about build failures. are you >> volunteering, Allen? > > This seems reasonable, except what release should folks who *require* > java 8 use? Nightly trunk+patches builds? How do downstream projects test? > Should JDK8 fixes be going into a branch? (I’m making the assumption that > fixes for JDK8 are not backward compatible with JDK7. Hopefully they are, > but given our usage of private APIs…) > > I’ve been approached by a few people over the past month+ if I’d be > interested in or will be RM’ing 3.0. I’m seriously considering it esp given > a) it’d be a nice learning experience for me b) my “day job” makes it > practical time-wise c) I seem to be the only one concerned enough about quite > a bit of stale code to get it out the door. > > FWIW, I’m in the process of moving my test vm to JDK8 to see how bad > the damage truly is right now. Based on others, it seems security doesn’t > work, which is a pretty big deal. I can certainly start posting trunk builds > on people.apache.org if folks are interested. > >> -we switch trunk to Java 7 NOW. That doesn't mean a rewrite fest going >> through all catch() statements making them multicatch, and the same for >> string case. > > Yup. There’s little reason *not* to switch trunk to JDK7 now.