Almost five years later, so probably too late to help the original asker, but I had the same problem today trying to run jsvc with open-jdk-11 for AMD64, so this might help someone later.
To diagnose the problem, I ran jsvc with the --debug flag, and that told me that it was choking on trying to find libjvm.so. I ran find /usr/lib/jvm/java-11-openjdk-amd64 -name libjvm.so
and found it at /usr/lib/jvm/java-11-openjdk-amd64/lib/server/libjvm.so, but jsvc was looking for it at /usr/lib/jvm/java-11-openjdk-amd64//lib/amd64/server/libjvm.so. So, I did this, and then jscv worked:
sudo mkdir /usr/lib/jvm/java-11-openjdk-amd64/lib/amd64
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-11-openjdk-amd64/lib/server /usr/lib/jvm/java-11-openjdk-amd64/lib/amd64/
It turns out the problem is fixed in later versions of jsvc. I experienced the issue with jsvc version 1.0.6, which is the one you get if you run apt install jsvc
on Ubuntu 18.04. After I downloaded the 1.2.0 version commons-daemon src from Apache and compiled jsvc myself, the issue is fixed and I didn't need the symlink anymore.