The static-libs sub-package has been added to OpenJDK in order to support the Mandrel use-case. A native-image distribution specifically for Quarkus. As Mandrel is based on GraalVM CE it only needs the static libraries from OpenJDK for the native libraries and not the JVM itself. In fact, the GraalVM project provides its version of a libjvm.a when linking native images for an application. Therefore, inclusion of libjvm.a from the JDK isn't desired.

Note that with JDK-8307858 in preparation for the Hermetic Java project, static linking support has been enabled and the static-libs-image make target changed to include libjvm.a as well.

For the Mandrel use-cases on JDK 22+ the make target static-libs-graal-image should be used instead which produces the static libs in folder static-libs-graal in the images directory of the OpenJDK build.

One effect of including libjvm.a in the static-libs subpackage is that its size increased significantly:
JDK 21: 38.97 MB
JDK 25: 484.03 MB