Now that JDK 11 is fully released with a raft of excellent new features, many developers are looking to use it in containerized environments. This is a great time to do so, with many new container-friendly features being added in each release starting with JDK 8.

If you are a conscientious image-builder, you will have heard many times the advice to keep ‘em small. From Google, from me, from Red Hat or from someone else. The reasons are numerous:

small images are faster to copy around,

they are faster to start,

by removing unneeded things you are reducing the damage that a security exploit could do.

This post talks through some of the options and pitfalls in building small JVM container images based on Alpine Linux.

Alpine, Musl and the JVM

For many use-cases, Alpine Linux is the ideal base image to use. First of all it’s very small - 4.4mb, while a typical Linux “slim” image might be over 100.

However, there is an important difference between Alpine and other common Linux distros: it does not use glibc, instead it uses musl. What are glibc and musl? They are programming APIs for the Linux Kernel, doing such things as opening files or network connections. Although they are abstractions over the same underlying thing (the Linux Kernel binary interface), they expose slightly different APIs. So C or C++ code which is compiled against glibc will not run on a musl system, and vice-versa.

Why am I telling you, dear Java programmer, about C and C++ Kernel APIs? Well, because you use an application written in C++ to do a lot of your work: The JVM! And how the JVM interacts with the Linux kernel is critical to how it can be used in containers. If you want to put your Java or Clojure or Kotlin or Scala application in a container, and benefit from Alpine’s small size, you need some way to run your JVM on musl!

Project Portola

So, we know there are some code changes needed to allow the JVM to run on musl-based systems - lucky for us then, that such changes do exist in the repository of Project Portola. Oracle is publishing Early-Access builds of the Portola code base for the in-development JDK version (currently JDK 12) and is gauging the interest in the port to decide how to move forward with it. Given the experimental status of the port there are not yet any GA versions of it. In fact I have not found any publicly available builds of OpenJDK 11 (or any older version) for musl from any vendor.

But, don’t worry, there is a way forward.

Glibc Compatibility for JVM on Alpine

Sasha Gerrand maintains a glibc package for Alpine Linux. If you add this package to an Alpine system, you will be able to run glibc-based applications - including any glibc-based JDK or JRE - WOW!

This is how the Alpine images are produced by AdoptOpenJDK - they do not use Portola, or any musl port of the JVM. The total size of Alpine plus the glibc-compatibility layer (and all the tools needed to install it) is 16mb. This is a lot bigger than the base Alpine image, but still a lot smaller than ubuntu, for example.

For the most part you can just take one of the AdoptOpenJDK images and run your application as usual, enjoying the 100+ megabyte image size reduction. The largest component of your image is now likely to be the JDK. You could stop here, but if you want even smaller images, read on…

Using jlink to shrink the JDK

You are highly unlikely to be using all of the features that the JDK provides. I’ve written about using jlink to shrink JDK distributions before, twice - the TL;DR is that jlink can provide a JDK distribution which contains only the Java modules you need. This can save a lot of space.

If you are using Portola-based JDKs then the smaller JDK which jlink creates will be fine to run on Alpine as-is, and you can have a Dockerfile like this:

FROM alpine:latest as build # This is the latest Portola distribution at the time of writing ADD https://download.java.net/java/early_access/alpine/18/binaries/openjdk-12-ea+18_linux-x64-musl_bin.tar.gz /opt/jdk RUN ["/opt/jdk/jdk-12/jlink", "--compress=2", \ "--module-path", "/opt/jdk/jdk-12/jmods", \ "--add-modules", "java.base", \ "--output", "/jlinked"] FROM alpine:latest COPY --from=build /jlinked /opt/jdk/ ADD HelloWorld.class / CMD ["/opt/jdk/bin/java", "HelloWorld"]

However, if you try using adoptopenjdk/openjdk-11:alpine-slim as your base image for the first stage then you will notice two things:

you won’t need to use the ADD line - the JDK’s already there

line - the JDK’s already there rather importantly, you will also find that the resulting image does’t work

It will fail with a rather confusing not found error. The error is because the adoptopenjdk/openjdk-11:alpine-slim JDK builds use the regular glibc-based JVMs, and jlink from those will produce another glibc-based JVM. So those JVMs in a plain alpine:latest image ain’t gonna run. You need to manually install the glibc-compatibility package in your final image, just as was done in the base image from AdoptOpenJDK.

The easiest way to do that right now is to copy exactly how AdoptOpenJDK have done it, which you can find in a rather beefy RUN command in their Alpine Dockerfiles. A Dockerfile which you can use as a basis for your own builds from is as follows:

FROM adoptopenjdk/openjdk11:alpine-slim AS jlink RUN ["jlink", "--compress=2", \ "--module-path", "/opt/java/openjdk/jmods", \ "--add-modules", "java.base", \ # Maybe you need to add more modules here? "--output", "/jlinked"] # Use jdeps to find out. FROM alpine # This is the line from AdoptOpenJDK: RUN apk --update add --no-cache ca-certificates curl openssl binutils xz \ && GLIBC_VER="2.28-r0" \ && ALPINE_GLIBC_REPO="https://github.com/sgerrand/alpine-pkg-glibc/releases/download" \ && GCC_LIBS_URL="https://archive.archlinux.org/packages/g/gcc-libs/gcc-libs-8.2.1%2B20180831-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz" \ && GCC_LIBS_SHA256=e4b39fb1f5957c5aab5c2ce0c46e03d30426f3b94b9992b009d417ff2d56af4d \ && ZLIB_URL="https://archive.archlinux.org/packages/z/zlib/zlib-1%3A1.2.9-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz" \ && ZLIB_SHA256=bb0959c08c1735de27abf01440a6f8a17c5c51e61c3b4c707e988c906d3b7f67 \ && curl -Ls https://alpine-pkgs.sgerrand.com/sgerrand.rsa.pub -o /etc/apk/keys/sgerrand.rsa.pub \ && curl -Ls ${ALPINE_GLIBC_REPO}/${GLIBC_VER}/glibc-${GLIBC_VER}.apk > /tmp/${GLIBC_VER}.apk \ && apk add /tmp/${GLIBC_VER}.apk \ && curl -Ls ${GCC_LIBS_URL} -o /tmp/gcc-libs.tar.xz \ && echo "${GCC_LIBS_SHA256} /tmp/gcc-libs.tar.xz" | sha256sum -c - \ && mkdir /tmp/gcc \ && tar -xf /tmp/gcc-libs.tar.xz -C /tmp/gcc \ && mv /tmp/gcc/usr/lib/libgcc* /tmp/gcc/usr/lib/libstdc++* /usr/glibc-compat/lib \ && strip /usr/glibc-compat/lib/libgcc_s.so.* /usr/glibc-compat/lib/libstdc++.so* \ && curl -Ls ${ZLIB_URL} -o /tmp/libz.tar.xz \ && echo "${ZLIB_SHA256} /tmp/libz.tar.xz" | sha256sum -c - \ && mkdir /tmp/libz \ && tar -xf /tmp/libz.tar.xz -C /tmp/libz \ && mv /tmp/libz/usr/lib/libz.so* /usr/glibc-compat/lib \ && apk del binutils \ && rm -rf /tmp/${GLIBC_VER}.apk /tmp/gcc /tmp/gcc-libs.tar.xz /tmp/libz /tmp/libz.tar.xz /var/cache/apk/* COPY --from=jlink /jlinked /opt/jdk/ ## Add your application here, and change the CMD below to start it CMD ["/opt/jdk/bin/java", "-version"]

Personally, I rather hope that Portola can graduate to GA, as we’ll have an easier way to create images, not to mention a few tens of mb less in them. If you are interested, please download it and try it out. In order to move Alpine to “supported” and have GA releases of Portola Oracle is looking for people to be actively interested: contribute to the extent of your abilities - code and tests are welcome but so is being active and public about your support - say if you find any issues, and say too if everything worked fine. If containers are critical to your company, saying that you would be interested in a Java SE Subscription if Alpine were supported would go a long way, too.

[Thank you to Portola Project Lead, Mikael Vidstedt, Aurelio Garcia-Ribeyro and Dinakar Guniguntala for proof-reading this post and helpful improvements]