Comment 32 for bug 174759

At work I've been using the IBM JDK as a workaround, Eclipse seems to work perfectly with that. You can then even speedup Eclipse startup a bit by using class data sharing (-Xshareclasses) option, which is similar to the -Xshare option in Sun JRE, but vastly better :)

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/linux/download.html
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/linux/6/sdkandruntimeguide.lnx.html#classdatasharing