In Java 8 the build system supplied a mapfile which set the symbol version for JAWT_GetAWT[1]. It is no longer the case for Java 11+ due to JDK-8200178[2]. If the native library was linked against Java 8 (e.g. lwjgl 2.x) then it would be linking against the versioned symbol. The assertion in the loader only fires when the version section (.gnu.version) is absent, otherwise the loader provides the default version [3]. The workaround forces the creation of the .gnu.version section (due to enforcing libc linking) and allows the lwjgl (or similar) library to be initialized. A similar workaround would be putting a dummy function with calloc() inside jawt library.
[1] https://github.com/openjdk/jdk8u/blob/master/jdk/make/mapfiles/libjawt/mapfile-vers [2] https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8200178 [3] https://git.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/glibc/tree/elf/dl-lookup.c#n114
