Mandrel

Mandrel 24.1.0.0-Final is a downstream distribution of the GraalVM community edition for JDK 23.
Mandrel's main goal is to provide a native-image release specifically to support Quarkus.
The aim is to align the native-image capabilities from GraalVM with OpenJDK and Red Hat Enterprise Linux libraries to improve maintainability for native Quarkus applications.

How Does Mandrel Differ From Graal

Mandrel releases are built from a code base derived from the upstream GraalVM code base, with only minor changes but some significant exclusions.
They support the same native image capability as GraalVM with no significant changes to functionality.
They do not include support for Polyglot programming via the Truffle interpreter and compiler framework.
In consequence, it is not possible to extend Mandrel by downloading languages from the Truffle language catalogue.

Mandrel is also built slightly differently to GraalVM, using the standard OpenJDK project release of jdk 23+37.
This means it does not profit from a few small enhancements that Oracle have added to the version of OpenJDK used to build their own GraalVM downloads.
Most of these enhancements are to the JVMCI module that allows the Graal compiler to be run inside OpenJDK.
The others are small cosmetic changes to behaviour.
These enhancements may in some cases cause minor differences in the progress of native image generation.
They should not cause the resulting images themselves to execute in a noticeably different manner.

Prerequisites

Mandrel's native-image depends on the following packages:

• freetype-devel
• gcc
• glibc-devel
• libstdc++-static
• zlib-devel

On Fedora/CentOS/RHEL they can be installed with:

dnf install glibc-devel zlib-devel gcc freetype-devel libstdc++-static

Note: The package might be called glibc-static or libstdc++-devel instead of libstdc++-static depending on your system.
If the system is missing stdc++, gcc-c++ package is needed too.

On Ubuntu-like systems with:

apt install g++ zlib1g-dev libfreetype6-dev

Quick start

$ tar -xf mandrel-java23-linux-amd64-24.1.0.0-Final.tar.gz
$ export JAVA_HOME="$( pwd )/mandrel-java23-24.1.0.0-Final"
$ export GRAALVM_HOME="${JAVA_HOME}"
$ export PATH="${JAVA_HOME}/bin:${PATH}"
$ curl -O -J 'https://code.quarkus.io/d?e=rest&cn=code.quarkus.io'
$ unzip code-with-quarkus.zip
$ cd code-with-quarkus/
$ ./mvnw package -Pnative
$ ./target/code-with-quarkus-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT-runner

Quarkus builder image

Mandrel Quarkus builder image can be used to build a Quarkus native Linux executable right away without any GRAALVM_HOME setup.

curl -O -J 'https://code.quarkus.io/d?e=rest&cn=code.quarkus.io'
unzip code-with-quarkus.zip
cd code-with-quarkus
./mvnw package -Pnative -Dquarkus.native.container-build=true \
    -Dquarkus.native.builder-image=quay.io/quarkus/ubi-quarkus-mandrel-builder-image:jdk-23
./target/code-with-quarkus-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT-runner

One can use the builder image on Windows with e.g. Podman Desktop, see Podman For Windows.

powershell -c "Invoke-WebRequest -OutFile quarkus.zip -Uri https://code.quarkus.io/d?e=rest&cn=code.quarkus.io"
powershell -c "Expand-Archive -Path quarkus.zip -DestinationPath . -Force
cd code-with-quarkus
mvnw package -Pnative -Dquarkus.native.container-build=true -Dquarkus.native.builder-image=quay.io/quarkus/ubi-quarkus-mandrel-builder-image:jdk-23
podman build -f src/main/docker/Dockerfile.native -t my-quarkus-mandrel-app .
podman run -i --rm -p 8080:8080 my-quarkus-mandrel-app

Changelog

For a complete list of changes please visit jdk-23.0.0...mandrel-24.1.0.0-Final

Mandrel 24.1.0.0-Final
OpenJDK used: 23+37