ansible: use Java 17 on AIX

[richardlau]

Update the JRE used to run the Jenkins agent on AIX to Java 1117.
Also adds /opt/freeware/bin to the PATH for the agent to
pick up binaries from yum packages that no longer create symbolic
links in /usr/bin.

Refs: #2718

Trying this out on test-osuosl-aix72-ppc64_be-3 to see if we still hit issues with agent disconnects and/or zombie processes when the Jenkins agent is run with Java 1117.

[mhdawson]

LGTM

[sxa]

Is there a reason to add /opt/freeware/bin to the START of the PATH? In general I'd consider it preferable to not override the default system utilities from /usr/bin where possible but there may be a good reason for doing it in this case so I won't block this if the comment can be dismissed :-)

[richardlau]

Is there a reason to add /opt/freeware/bin to the START of the PATH? In general I'd consider it preferable to not override the default system utilities from /usr/bin where possible but there may be a good reason for doing it in this case so I won't block this if the comment can be dismissed :-)

It might not need to be at the start of the PATH. I'll try moving it to the end.

[sxa]

Maybe it should be java 17 now ;-)

[richardlau]

Maybe it should be java 17 now ;-)

Tried. Can't find a Java 17 JRE for AIX via the api.adoptopenjdk.net rest API we're using in the Ansible scripts.

[sxa]

Maybe it should be java 17 now ;-)
Tried. Can't find a Java 17 JRE for AIX via the api.adoptopenjdk.net rest API we're using in the Ansible scripts.

That is a fair point. We haven't been able to release AIX17 formally yet although there are nightly builds that are available if you use ea instead of ga and go for hotpost instead of openj9 but they should obviously not necesarily be considered production ready. But they might be worth trying to see if they do show the same problems.

[richardlau]

Updated to try Java 17 ea. (FWIW it appears that openj9 still worked 🤷.)

[richardlau]

Status on this is we're still encountering #2718 with Java 17 (and 11 before that) so just changing Java hasn't affected the Jenkins behavior. We may still want to use a later Java so I'll leave this open for now but we're focusing on trying to resolve #2718.

[richardlau]

Superseded by #3047.