Description
Since we don't currently check for a Java version >= 1.7 but use flags that were introduced in 1.7, you can get cryptic error messages when starting Cassandra with 1.6. For example:
~/cassandra $ JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.26/ bin/cassandra -f Unrecognized VM option 'StringTableSize=1000003' Could not create the Java virtual machine.
We had some code in 1.2 to detect the java version and change flags depending on that, so that would be a good starting point: https://github.com/apache/cassandra/blob/cassandra-1.2/conf/cassandra-env.sh#L209