Serguey Asael Shinder: Building the JDK on an Intel Mac now fails unless you pass a flag
JEP 541, Deprecate the macOS/x64 Port for Removal, is completed and in JDK 28. The text is at https://openjdk.org/jeps/541. If you build the JDK yourself on an Intel Mac, this is the release where that stops being routine.
What actually changes
configure fails:
$ bash ./configure
...
checking compilation type... native
configure: error: The macOS/x64 port is deprecated and may be removed in a
future release. Use --enable-deprecated-ports to suppress this error.
configure exiting with result code 1There is a way through — --enable-deprecated-ports turns the error into a warning and the build continues — but the JEP is blunt about what that buys you: "There will be no guarantee that the port will build, much less function."
Two other facts in the same document matter more than the flag:
- Oracle engineers stop maintaining macOS/x64 as of JDK 27. Not 28. The maintenance ended one release before the deprecation is visible in the build.
- macOS/x64 is disabled by default in the JDK repository's GitHub Actions, so mainline development is no longer gated on it building at all. Whatever breaks there will not be caught upstream.
The stated reason is Apple's transition to AArch64 and the phase-out of x64 hardware, and the maintenance burden of keeping a port alive for it.
What this is not
It is not the end of running Java on an Intel Mac. This is the OpenJDK port — the work of building the JDK for that platform. Existing builds keep working, and vendors shipping their own binaries make their own decisions on their own timelines. If you use a distributed JDK, the question to ask is your vendor's support matrix, not this JEP.
It is not final. The Alternatives section keeps the door open in the usual way: if a credible set of developers commits to maintaining the port, the deprecation can be withdrawn before integration, or reverted by a follow-on JEP before removal. That has happened for other ports. It requires people, not opinions.
What I would check this week
Your CI image. Any pipeline that builds OpenJDK from source on macOS/x64 will start failing at configure, with a message that reads like a policy statement rather than a build error — the kind that gets misfiled as "CI is broken" for a day.
Your local toolchain. If your team still has Intel Macs and someone builds a JDK on one to reproduce a bug, that path now needs a flag and offers no guarantees. Reproducing on AArch64 or on Linux/x64 is the route with support behind it.
And your assumptions about x64 on the desktop. The interesting part of this JEP is not macOS. It is that a mainstream desktop architecture is now being deprecated out of a platform on a normal release cadence — after the hardware vendor moved, and with the maintenance stopping a release before the warning appears.