Consider this:

$ bin/jimage expand --dir tmp lib/modules/bootmodules.jimage
$ bin/jimage create --dir tmp lib/modules/bootmodules.jimage.new
$ mv lib/modules/bootmodules.jimage.new lib/modules/bootmodules.jimage
$ bin/java Test
Error: A JNI error has occurred, please check your installation and try again
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError
at sun.launcher.LauncherHelper$ResourceBundleHolder.<clinit>(LauncherHelper.java:97)
at sun.launcher.LauncherHelper.getLocalizedMessage(LauncherHelper.java:327)
at sun.launcher.LauncherHelper.abort(LauncherHelper.java:450)
at sun.launcher.LauncherHelper.checkAndLoadMain(LauncherHelper.java:517)
Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException
at jdk.internal.jimage.BasicImageReader.getResource(BasicImageReader.java:202)
at jdk.internal.jimage.PackageModuleMap.readFrom(PackageModuleMap.java:62)
at jdk.internal.jimage.ImageReader.open(ImageReader.java:92)
at jdk.internal.jimage.ImageReader.open(ImageReader.java:100)
at sun.misc.URLClassPath$JImageLoader.<init>(URLClassPath.java:1137)
at sun.misc.URLClassPath$3.run(URLClassPath.java:373)
at sun.misc.URLClassPath$3.run(URLClassPath.java:361)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at sun.misc.URLClassPath.getLoader(URLClassPath.java:360)
at sun.misc.URLClassPath.getLoader(URLClassPath.java:337)
at sun.misc.URLClassPath.access$000(URLClassPath.java:64)
at sun.misc.URLClassPath$2.next(URLClassPath.java:277)
at sun.misc.URLClassPath$2.hasMoreElements(URLClassPath.java:288)
at java.lang.ClassLoader$2.hasMoreElements(ClassLoader.java:1276)
at sun.misc.CompoundEnumeration.next(CompoundEnumeration.java:45)
at sun.misc.CompoundEnumeration.hasMoreElements(CompoundEnumeration.java:54)
at java.util.ServiceLoader$LazyIterator.hasNextService(ServiceLoader.java:354)
at java.util.ServiceLoader$LazyIterator.hasNext(ServiceLoader.java:393)
at java.util.ServiceLoader$1.hasNext(ServiceLoader.java:474)
at java.util.ResourceBundle.<clinit>(ResourceBundle.java:377)
... 4 more


Alexey Fedorchenko reports something similar but he gets:

"Error occurred during initialization of VM
java/lang/NoClassDefFoundError: java/lang/Object"

on a Windows build.