As described in JDK-8248987 "AOT's Linker.java seems to eagerly fail-fast on Windows", jtreg curates the environment variables exposed to the test subject, and if devkit is not used all AOT regression tests will fail.

This problem arises when trying to backport JDK-8358538 "Update GHA Windows runner to 2025", where all AOT regression tests fail because the "ProgramFiles(x86)" environment variable is not passed to tests when using Visual Studio 2022.

A previous attempt to backport JDK-8283723 "Update Visual Studio 2022 to version 17.1.0 for Oracle builds on Windows" to JDK-11 was discarded.

As a workaround a proper default value can be used for the "ProgramFiles(x86)" environment variable, that is used only when the variable is not set, so these tests may be run successfully with the new GHA Windows runners before the current "windows-2019" runners are removed by 2025-06-30.