JRE fatal error after shrinking with Proguard

I'm bundling the JRE with my JavaFX application on Mac using gradle-macappbundle. I'm trying to reduce the size of the JRE so I don't have to include the full ~200 MB. I have followed the instructions in the Java8 README to remove some optional components.

After the macappbundle plugin creates the .app, I want to run Proguard on the JRE(I'm using the gradle plugin for it) to remove even more unused classes.

My current proguard rules:

task shrinkJRE(type: ProGuardTask, dependsOn: 'createApp') {
    injars "build/macApp/"
    outjars "build/libs/pro/"

    keep "class java.** { *; }"

    ignorewarnings()
    dontobfuscate()
    dontoptimize()
}

This produces a JRE about 45 MB.

But after doing chmod +x on the JavaAppLauncher executable and running it, it shows this error:

#
# A fatal error has been detected by the Java Runtime Environment:
#
#  SIGSEGV (0xb) at pc=0x000000010c6025e4, pid=86901, tid=0x0000000000002303
#
# JRE version:  (8.0_181-b13) (build )
# Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (25.181-b13 mixed mode bsd-amd64 compressed oops)
# Problematic frame:
# V  [libjvm.dylib+0x5825e4]  universe_post_init()+0x6a9
#
# Core dump written. Default location: /cores/core or core.86901
#
# An error report file with more information is saved as:
# /Users/rishiraja/hs_err_pid86901.log
#
# If you would like to submit a bug report, please visit:
#   http://bugreport.java.com/bugreport/crash.jsp
#
Abort trap: 6 (core dumped)

Could anyone help me find the cause of this error?

My guess is that I'm missing some required classes for the JRE, so what are some classes I might also need to "keep"?

Solution

The officially supported alternative to doing is now jlink and jpackage. Using the gradle plugin for jlink makes it very easy to produce small packages for distribution.