GNU News Archives

The COBOL programming language may be 65 years old since its original release but the mainline GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) in 2025 might finally see upstream support for it.

Ahead of the GNU C Library "glibc" 2.41 release due out around early February, more C23 features are being finished up. The latest crossing the finish line is support for C23's sinpi, cospi, and tanpi trigonometric functions.

The GCC 15 code compiler that is releasing as stable in the early months of 2025 has removed all support for the Altera Nios II CPU target.

The GNU Linux-libre 6.12-gnu kernel is now available as the downstream of the newly-christened Linux 6.12 kernel that aims to remove code depending upon non-free microcode/firmware or relying on other elements of code deemed non-free software even with much of today's hardware requiring proprietary firmware for operation.

GCC 15 feature development is now officially over with entering stage three development to focus on fixing compiler bugs.

The GCC 15 compiler on Friday switched its default C language version from the GNU dialect of C17 to the current C23 standard.

GCC 15 feature development is soon wrapping up to focus on bug fixing before releasing GCC 15.1 as stable in the early months of 2025. One of the latest features to make it in the compiler codebase is code generation support around Arm Guarded Control Stack (GCS) functionality.

Back in Linux 6.11 support for getrandom() in the vDSO was upstreamed for much better performance in providing speedy yet secure random number generation (RNG) needs. Since Linux 6.11 getrandom in the vDSO has expanded to more CPU architectures and now there's a notable user-space user ready to go: the GNU C Library "glibc" support was merged.

Fujitsu has upstreamed support for their next-gen "Monaka" Armv9 processor into the GNU Compiler Collection codebase in time for the GCC 15 release coming out early next year.

GNU Boot is a "100% free software project aimed at replacing the non-free boot software" and is a downstream of Coreboot, GRUB, and SeaBIOS. While priding itself on being "100% free", last December they had to drop some motherboard support and CPU code after discovering they were shipping some files that are non-free by their free software standards. Today they announced another mistake in having inadvertently been shipping additional non-free code.

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) support for the C23 programming language standard is now considered "essentially feature-complete" with GCC 15. As such they are preparing to enable the C23 language version (using the GNU23 dialect) by default for the C language version of GCC when not otherwise specified.

Richard Biener of SUSE published a GCC 15.0.0 status report for outlining the current development state of the GCC 15 open-source compiler as it works its way toward the stable GCC 15.1 release in the early months of 2025.

The GCC 14 compiler marked Itanium IA-64 support as obsolete with plans to remove that Intel architecture in GCC 15. But for now at least the Itanium Linux compiler support has seen some reprieve with it being un-deprecated.

Building off yesterday's Linux 6.11 release, the GNU Linux-libre 6.11-gnu kernel is now available that is the downstream stripping out driver support/features depending upon closed-source microcode/firmware and other modifications in the name of software freedom and ensuring no closed-source bits are used on Linux-libre-enabled systems.

A patch merged yesterday to the GNU C Library (glibc) codebase can help the memset() function's performance by 24% as measured on an Arm Neoverse-N1 core.

The AMD GCN3 (GFX8) support and in particular the Fiji GPU support is being retired from the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). The Fiji GPU support in the GCC compiler was already deprecated in part due to the LLVM compiler having already removed Fiji support months ago and the AMD ROCm compute driver having broken GCN3 / Fiji support for years.

The very useful GNU Screen program for multiplexing terminals between processes is out with a shiny new feature release.

As the first new release in more than one year, GNU DDD 3.4.1 is now available as a GUI front-end to the GNU Debugger (GDB).

As a follow up to the article from a few weeks ago of Intel publishing the AVX10.2 specifications and posting GCC compiler patches for that next iteration of AVX10, the initial support was merged today into the GNU Compiler Collection.

GNU Binutils 2.43 is out as stable this Sunday as the newest update to this important piece of the open-source GNU compiler toolchain.

GCC 14.2 hit the Internet today as the first stable point release update to the GCC 14 series following the inaugural GCC 14.1 stable release from early May.

GNU C Library "glibc" 2.40 is now available with more C23 features being enabled as well as some new performance tunables on x86_64 and AArch64 along with other improvements to this widely used libc implementation.

Toward the end of 2022 a GCC AArch64 compiler change was quietly made by Arm that allows "-march=native" to be handled on 64-bit ARM by treating it as the equivalent "-mcpu=native" option. The change happened to fly under my radar at that time and didn't draw much attention at large while now it's finally being officially documented in hopes of similar behavior being adopted by other compilers for AArch64.

Stemming from a recent investigation into a GCC compiler regression on Zen 4, it was discovered that the unaligned load/store costs for the Zen 4 and Zen 5 targets were inaccurate and have now been tweaked within GCC Git.

GDB 15.1 was released on Sunday as the first version in the GNU Debugger 15 branch for this widely-used, open-source debugging solution.

Two years after originally posting patches for working on Unified Shared Memory (USM) support for OpenMP with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), there is finally an updated patch-set for implementing this shared memory functionality with both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs.

Qualcomm has begun landing performance optimizations into the GNU C Library "glibc" for benefiting their new Oryon-1 CPU cores as found in the Snapdragon X Elite/Plus SoCs.

For those continuing to rely on the GCC 12 series open-source compiler that was introduced as stable in 2022, GCC 12.4 is out today as the newest bug fix release.

Zhaoxin Shijidadao CPU support was upstreamed today into the GCC 15 compiler codebase. Zhaoxin as a reminder is the joint venture between VIA and the Shanghai Municipal Government for creating x86/x86_64-compatible processors for the Chinese market.

Merged last month to the GNU C Library (glibc) Git code was a new tunable for non-temporal stores for memset. This optimization for glibc's memset performance was limited to Intel processors given at the time it was only tested/benchmarked on Intel CPUs but now it's proven to be useful too for AMD processors.

IBM compiler engineers are ready to flip-on their POWER11 support within the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) in wiring up the "-mcpu=power11" option.

Coming up on my radar today is a commit made to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for adjusting the loop alignment with Intel's generic tuning path. In turn this should address "some random performance penalty in benchmarks" with coping better around cache lines.

While GCC 14 recently debuted as stable in the form of GCC 14.1, for those relying on the GCC 13 compiler that debuted last year there is now a new point release available with many bug fixes.

Building off last night's release of Linux 6.9 stable, GNU Linux-libre 6.9-gnu has debuted as this kernel downstream that works on stripping out support for any drivers/hardware depending upon closed-source firmware/microcode and other alterations in the name of software freedom.

With GCC 14 stable released and GCC 15 now in development on trunk, new feature code is landing for the GNU Compiler Collection. Among the early features is Microsoft contributing the "Windows on ARM64" target with aarch64-w64-mingw32. The start of the new cycle also brings code removal for features deprecated in prior cycles. Among the old code being cleared out in GCC 15 is saying goodbye to Oracle Solaris 11.3.

GCC 14.1 has been released today as the first stable compiler release in the GCC 14 series. GCC 14.1 brings one year worth of improvements to this open-source compiler from new CPU support and new ISA extensions to new C/C++ language features, static analyzer improvements, new AMD GPU support, and many other additions.

Google Summer of Code 2024 (GSoC '24) accepted projects have been announced with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) seeing seven student developers engaging this summer with several of them focused on enhancing GCC's Rust front-end.

The release candidate of the GCC 14 compiler is available for testing as the annual feature update to the GNU Compiler Collection.

As mentioned following the AMD GFX90C target being added, the GCC 14 compiler code was branched from the main Git branch with release preparations for GCC 14 underway. A status report was just published outlining release plans for getting GCC 14.1 stable out around 7 May.

The GNU Portability Library for common portability code across platforms has seen a major rewrite to gnulib-tool, the program for importing modules from gnulib into their packages. This code rewrite of gnulib-tool is said to offer between eight and 100 times faster performance than the existing implementation.

While GNU Hurd continues having a tough time on x86 support and GNU Hurd x86_64 is being worked toward, the GCC 14 compiler has been working on compiler toolchain support for GNU Hurd AArch64.

David Malcolm of Red Hat's compiler team is out with his annual blog post summarizing the static analysis improvements to find with the upcoming GCC 14 stable compiler release.

GNU Poke 4.0 has been released after a year in development for enhancing this open-source software that serves as an interactive editor for binary data accompanied by its own procedural programming language.

While the uutils Rust-written Coreutils effort has been chugging along, the upstream GNU Coreutils effort is showing no signs of slowing down. Out today is GNU Coreutils 9.5 with yet more feature work and bug fixes including a security fix for a chmod issue that's been around since the beginning.

In-step with early Power11 patches in Linux 6.9, IBM engineers have posted the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) patches for enabling -mcpu=power11 targeting within this open-source compiler.

GNU Linux-libre 6.8-gnu is out as the newest downstream kernel variety endorsed by the Free Software Foundation that takes the upstream Linux kernel but does away with proprietary module support and stripping out drivers/functionality contingent upon binary-only microcode/firmware and other elements not deemed up to their free software standards.

GNUnet 0.21 has been released as a major update to this GNU project building a network stack for secure, decentralized, and privacy-preserving distributed applications. GNUnet continues striving for a "GNU internet" and with the v0.21 release has rolled out a new transport layer and working to address prior design shortcomings.

GDB 14.2 has been released to provide a few fixes for the GNU Debugger over its state found in last year's GDB 14.1.

Daniel Kiper with Oracle has provided a status update on current GRUB bootloader development activities, a look ahead, and plans for hopefully having out the next release in November.

GNU libmicrohttpd version 1.0.0 is out today as the first major release of this C library implementing an easy-to-run HTTP web server that is embed-friendly for use by other applications.