We have an open RFE targeted to JDK 10 to get the JVM to play nicely with memory limits imposed by a Docker container (through the Linux cgroups facility): JDK-8146115
There has been a non-Oracle submission to get some basic support for this into 9:
http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/hotspot-dev/2016-November/025404.html
then:
http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/hotspot-dev/2016-December/025406.html
It is proposed for this RFE that we add an experimental VM option, such as -XX:+UseCGroupMemoryLimitForHeap, to opt-in to using the value in /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/memory.limit_in_bytes as the value for phys_mem as suggested in the submission.
This will allow us to get quick feedback from the community and customers as to how things work, and allow us to shape the full RFE for JDK 10.