When we introduced the use of the portable build in RHEL (RHELPLAN-141108), we did so in the upcoming RHEL 8.8 and 9.2 releases and did not backport the change to earlier RHEL releases.

The expectation was that the older builds would naturally expire with the associated RHEL releases. However, two years later, we are still supporting all the RHEL releases we did then. The move to ELS has already led to OpenJDK 11 only using the portable build on RHEL 8 & 9 without issue, and it makes sense to now follow suit with java-1.8.0-openjdk & java-17-openjdk.

The main concern is the crypto policy and FIPS support which was developed in successive RHEL releases. Using the portable build will mean that this support is upgraded to the latest version on older RHEL releases. In particular, it will enable it by default on java-1.8.0-openjdk on RHEL 8.2. We should make customers aware of this in the release notes.

Out of scope for this epic are:

• RHEL builds of java-1.8.0-openjdk on RHEL 7.9
• Legacy portable builds on RHEL 7 for OpenJDK 8 & 17

Changing these would first require the portable build used by RHEL to be built on RHEL 7 or (more likely) using the devkit which supports RHEL 7 as java-21-openjdk does.