I can attest that this bug does in fact occur even with "vanilla" Karaf Hibernate features.
I created a minimal test case: https://github.com/Mike-Now/Karaf-Tutorial/tree/master/cxf/personservice-rest Just run: mvn clean install and add features.xml to your karaf instance. If, by luck, the karaf instance won't freeze while installing bundle "tut", you will be presented with: "java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: com.sun.el.ExpressionFactoryImpl not found by org.hibernate.validator". -- View this message in context: http://karaf.922171.n3.nabble.com/Does-hibernate-work-in-karaf-4-1-it-does-in-4-0-tp4050737p4051153.html Sent from the Karaf - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.