The Adoptium Working Group has released the first Eclipse Temurin Java SE binaries. Adoptium will provide Temurin binaries every six months along with maintenance/security updates every three months. Long Term Support (LTS) releases are produced for at least four years.
Temurin builds are TCK-certified and available for various architectures and support the Linux, Windows, macOS and AIX operating systems. Docker images are available via the Docker Hub. The Java Runtime Environment (JRE) is only available for Java 8 and 11 and it is recommended to use Jlink to create custom optimized runtimes.
Formerly known as AdoptOpenJDK, the independent organization changed its name to Eclipse Adoptium after joining the Eclipse Foundation in June 2020. The Adoptium Working Group was formally established nine months later. The current AdoptOpenJDK website and API are still available, although it’s advised to make use of the new Adoptium website and API which is directly equivalent to the AdoptOpenJDK API to enable a smooth transition.
Founding organizations of the Adoptium Working Group include Alibaba Cloud, Huawei, IBM, iJUG, Karakun AG, Microsoft, New Relic and Red Hat. Two representatives from each organization comprise the Adoptium Steering Committee.
The transition to Adoptium included a split of AdoptOpenJDK into multiple sub-projects under the Adoptium top level project:
- Eclipse AQAvit focuses on unit testing using the AdoptOpenJDK Quality Assurance (AQA) Test Suite.
- Eclipse Temurin, an anagram of "runtime," focuses on building and releasing quality JDK binaries that are enterprise-caliber, cross-platform, open-source licensed, and TCK-tested for Java SE.
- Eclipse Temurin Compliance governs access to the materials and resources offered by Oracle's proprietary Java Compatibility Kit (or TCK for Java SE) and Eclipse Mission Control to monitor and manage Java applications, and Eclipse Adoptium Incubator for experimentation.
The runtimes are tested with the Eclipse AQAvit test suite and certified through Oracle’s Java SE TCK, which is licensed to the Eclipse Foundation, to determine the compatibility with the Java specification. As part of the TCK agreement, Adoptium is not allowed to release OpenJ9 or GraalVM based runtimes. IBM now distributes the OpenJ9 runtimes under the new name, Semeru.
For now, the AdoptOpenJDK API serves both Temurin and Semeru builds when asked for hotspot or openj9 builds, respectively. Archived releases from AdoptOpenJDK will not migrate to Adoptium as only AQAvit and JCK tested releases are supported.