Hot on the heels of the Oracle release of its Java SE 7 Update 21, there is a new icedtea version which brings the free and open source version of Java – OpenJDK – to version 7 Update 21 as well. The OpenJDK 7u21 release addresses several vulnerabilities.

The announcement was made on the mailing list first, but Andrew John Hughes wrote a more official blurb on his blog.

Here is the list (taken from Andrew’s post) of the vulnerabilities which have been plugged and their CVE numbers:

My packages for OpenJDK have been compiled on Slackware 13.37 (and are useable on 13.37 as well as 14.0 and -current!). Get them preferably from a mirror site:

I am happy to announce that I was able to build an ARM version of the OpenJDK again. The build with the “cacao” VM was failing for several months now, and I switched to the “jamvm” which is a small (but fully compliant), efficient Java virtual Machine with JIT compiler.. Sources and packages to be found at http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/alienarm/

Further packages that are recommended/required:

  • Optional: If you want a Java browser-plugin you must install icedtea-web (OpenJDK itself does not contain such a plugin). Note that I updated my icedtea-web package less than a week ago, which pugs a few vulnerabilities (CVE-2013-1927 and CVE-2013-1926 to be precise).
  • Required: The rhino package is a dependency of the openjdk/openjre package. It contains the JavaScript engine for OpenJDK.

Eric