Red Hat is phasing out container images based on IBM's OpenJ9 JDK distribution by March 17th 2022, due to legal claims made by Oracle.
As this process draws to a close, Red Hat will stop offering OpenJ9-based images altogether.
Stakeholders are currently looking for replacement images that our customers could use to deploy applications to OpenShift on top of IBM Z and IBM Power-based infrastructure.

What this means for Quarkus:
Red Hat build of Quarkus relies on S2I images built on RHEL8, OpenJ9 and OpenJDK11 for deploying RHBQ applications to Openshift on IBM Z and IBM P hardware.
These images will become unavailable in the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog and must be replaced.
The most likely replacement will be multi-architecture images based on RHEL 8 and OpenJDK 11 (this part is till being discussed at the time of this update).

What is the impact on RHBQ docs:
Our documentation points customers to OpenJ9-based S2I images that they should use to deploy RHBQ application to OpenShift on IBM Z.
We need to stop pointing customers to these images as they become unavailable. Depending on the final decision by stakeholders, we'll point to whatever replacement S2I images are eventually selected.

UPDATE (From team meeting 17/2/2022)
Quarkus does not have product-specific container images, so the deprecation does not affect productized components.
We will start pointing the IBM Z customers to the multi-architecture UBI8 images (registry.redhat.io/ubi8) (instead of the current RHEL8+OpenJDK 11+OpenJ9 s2i images) in the OpenShift guide for RHBQ.

We must also warn the users of this changes in the release notes.
For this purpose, we will include a deprecation notice about the OpenJ9-based images.
UPDATE: Sangeeta has created a deprecation notice for this for EAP. We should adapt this for Quarkus and use it in the RN.

UPDATE:
Details about changes to Red Hat's Openj9 images are collected in the Java Change in PPC and s390x OpenShift Images KCS article.
We will link to this article from the deprecation notice in the Release Notes.

When is this happening:
Due to the proximity of the 2.2.5 GA release, we are not going to be able to deliver these revisions to docs before the release date (unless the release schedule changes to accommodate the extra time required to make this change) . The delivery will most likely happen in a follow-up docs update after the release of RHBQ 2.2.5.