As mentioned previously, I’ve moved the majority of my testing to OS X VMs running in either VMware Fusion or VMware ESXi. However, there has been one component of my build testing that I still needed actual Macs for: testing Oracle’s Java 7 updates. The reason for this is that Java 7 crashes when run inside of a VMWare Fusion VM.
Oracle has certified the following virtualization solutions as being Oracle JDK 7 and JRE 7 Certified System Configurations:
Certified:
Not certified:
VMware virtualization solutions
Microsoft virtualization solutions
Unfortunately, that meant unless Oracle or VMware stepped up, Java 7 wasn’t going to run inside an OS X VM. Fortunately, VMware stepped up. There is now a script available from VMware to patch liblwawt.dylib in the Java 7 Runtime Environment. The patch addresses the Java 7 crashing issue, allowing Java 7 Update 17 to run normally in an OS X 10.8.3 VM.
The patch is specific to 10.8.x VMs and does not work in 10.7.x VMs at this time.
I’ve posted a copy of the Python script that applies the patch here on my GitHub repo:
https://github.com/rtrouton/rtrouton_scripts/tree/master/rtrouton_scripts/vmware_fusion_java_7_patch
I’ve also built a payload-free package to run the script:
