Remove Java 8 from the ARM64 GitLab test matrix

[bric3]

What Does This Do

Exclude Java 8 variants from all ARM64 test jobs. Remove the ARM64 latest-dependency Java 8 entry and the resulting unused coverage logic.

Motivation

The newer JVMs contain AArch64 optimizations that might not have been back-ported to the Java 8 distributions we have in had in our test matrix. Moreover depending where the job is scheduled we can land on older hard ware that makes these jobs are way too slow.

It’s noteworthy that AWS explicitly reports that some customers only obtained Graviton's full performance benefit after moving from Java 8 to Java 11. It’s likely possible as well only Corretto 8 (the Amazon Java 8 distribution) got these optimizations, not the other vendors.

In general, here some specific optimizations that may be missing in our chosen Java 8 distributions:

• Native JVM atomics
• Lock spinning (see )
• JVM missing aarch64 intrinsics (see JEP-315, Oracle's Java-on-Arm article, JVM engineering presentation, slides 18-21)

Also, Java 8 lacks broader improvement made in later versions.

Additional Notes

Contributor Checklist

• Format the title according to the contribution guidelines
• Assign the type: and (comp: or inst:) labels in addition to any other useful labels
• Avoid using close, fix, or any linking keywords when referencing an issue
  Use solves instead, and assign the PR milestone to the issue
• Update the CODEOWNERS file on source file addition, migration, or deletion
• Update public documentation with any new configuration flags or behaviors
• Once approved, use merge queue to merge the PR

[chatgpt-codex-connector]

Codex Review Summary

This comment shows the latest Codex review activity on this pull request.

Review	Status	Commit	Review trigger
📝 Code Review	✅ Completed 2026-09-30T14:42:16.784556Z	81788bd	Draft marked ready
🔒 Security Review	✅ Completed 2026-09-30T14:44:34.075691Z	81788bd	Draft marked ready

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[datadog-official]

More details

The ARM64 rules consistently exclude all Java 8 distributions while retaining Java 8 coverage on AMD64; the removed ARM64 coverage branches are consequently unreachable.

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[dd-octo-sts]

🟢 Java Benchmark SLOs — All performance SLOs passed

Suite	Status
Startup	🟢 pass

SLO thresholds are defined here based on automatically generated metrics. A warning is raised when results are within 5% of the threshold.

PR vs. master results

Scenario	Candidate	master	Δ (95% CI of mean)
startup:insecure-bank:iast:Agent	14.92 s	14.75 s	[+0.0%; +2.3%] (maybe worse)
startup:insecure-bank:tracing:Agent	13.65 s	13.75 s	[-1.5%; -0.0%] (maybe better)
startup:petclinic:appsec:Agent	17.10 s	16.89 s	[+0.5%; +2.0%] (maybe worse)
startup:petclinic:iast:Agent	17.03 s	17.06 s	[-0.8%; +0.5%] (no difference)
startup:petclinic:profiling:Agent	16.66 s	16.79 s	[-2.0%; +0.3%] (no difference)
startup:petclinic:sca:Agent	16.89 s	16.87 s	[-0.9%; +1.1%] (no difference)
startup:petclinic:tracing:Agent	15.77 s	16.18 s	[-6.6%; +1.7%] (no difference)

Commit: 81788bd0 · CI Pipeline · Benchmarking Platform UI

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Load and DaCapo benchmarks can be triggered manually in the GitLab pipeline. Results will appear in the Benchmarking Platform UI after completion.

[sarahchen6]

👍