Comment 11 for bug 1646945

For upgrade from 3.0.3 to 3.1 a work around to avoid this issue is:

Edit line number 102 in "/etc/cassandra/cassandra-env.sh" to the following.

if [ "$JVM_VERSION" \< "1.8" ] && [ "$JVM_PATCH_VERSION" -lt "25" ] ; then

(add the '-lt' tag to JVM_PATCH_VERSION instead of the one that is currently there)
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After this restart cassandra and things should work for you.