openjdk failure: Invalid -Xlog option / Invalid decorator 'utctime'

[Graham Leggett]

When an attempt is made to deploy Elasticsearch debian package on an Ubuntu v16.04 xenial machine, elasticsearch refuses to start as follows:

Feb 28 10:54:22 els elasticsearch[1426]: [0.000s][error][logging] Invalid decorator 'utctime'.
Feb 28 10:54:22 els elasticsearch[1426]: Invalid -Xlog option '-Xlog:gc*,gc+age=trace,safepoint:file=/var/log/elasticsearch/gc.log:utctime,pid,tags:filecount=32,filesize=64m'
Feb 28 10:54:22 els elasticsearch[1426]: Error: Could not create the Java Virtual Machine.
Feb 28 10:54:22 els elasticsearch[1426]: Error: A fatal exception has occurred. Program will exit.

According to elasticsearch, ubuntu is using prerelease versions of openjdk in ubuntu (no idea if this is accurate or not): https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/28780

If the people at elasticsearch are correct, please ensure that a proper GA version of openjdk is released on Ubuntu stable distributions.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.