[pron]

It is not. Blocking IO (with some exceptions mentioned in the JEP) will automatically be translated by the runtime into non-blocking IO when it occurs on virtual threads, and no OS threads will be blocked. The Java code will look blocking and that's what thread dumps and other Java observability mechanisms will show, but to the OS it will seem as if it's running non-blocking code.

You can have a million threads blocking on a million sockets (obviously without creating a million OS threads): https://github.com/ebarlas/project-loom-c5m

You can't do that with thread pools. You could achieve that scalability with async code, but then observability tools will not be able to track the IO operations and who initiated them, but with virtual threads you'll see exactly what business operation is doing what IO and why.

[riku_iki]

> will automatically be translated by the runtime into non-blocking IO when it occurs on virtual threads, and no OS threads will be blocked

it looks like it is true for several API you implemented support for. What about other API, for example some JDBC driver which wants to use non-blocking DB driver. How to use virtual threads with that?

[pron]

JDBC drivers are implemented on top of JDK APIs and so will work the same way: their I/O would automatically be non-blocking when run on a virtual thread (module some quality-of-implementation issues around the use of synchronized that we're working on, which are mentioned in the material I linked to).

JDBC drivers that are implemented on top of their own native code are a different matter, but they are not common these days.