GNU News Archives

Following the release of GNU Glibc 2.36 earlier this week, GNU Binutils 2.39 released today for this common set of binary utilities on open-source systems.

Last month I ran a number of GCC 12 compiler optimization benchmarks for this latest-stable compiler atop an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X workstation. Those tests included various optimization levels as well as link-time optimizations (LTO). Some Phoronix Premium supporters also requested to see some fresh GCC 12 Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) benchmarks, so here in this article are those PGO benchmark results.

Released overnight was a new version of Glibc, the GNU C Library, commonly used by Linux systems as the default libc implementation.

Jason Donenfeld of WireGuard fame who has recently been spending much work on improving Linux's "random" kernel code has sent out a proposal adding getrandom() support to the vDSO for better performance in seeking to better address the needs of user-space developers.

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) developers are preparing for an August release of GCC 12.2 as the first stable point release update to this year's GCC 12 series.

Following this month's approval by the steering committee of GCC Rust as a compiler front-end for the Rust programming language, the first formal series has been sent out for review.

The arc4random, arc4random_buf, and arc4random_uniform functions have been common on the BSDs for years to provide higher quality random number generation than rand/random and alternative functions. But now as of yesterday the GNU C Library (Glibc) has finally added the arc4random functions for use on Linux!

The GCC Steering Committee has approved of the GCC Rust front-end providing Rust programming language support by the GNU Compiler Collection. This Rust front-end will likely be merged ahead of the GCC 13 release next year.

For those not yet on the GCC 11 or GCC 12 stable series, GCC 10.4 is out today as the latest in that older stable series.

The Rust-GCC front-end that allows Rust code to be compiled with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) could possibly be upstreamed for next year's GCC 13 compiler release but not necessarily complete at that stage. In any case, it's good seeing progress on Rust-GCC as an alternative to Rust's official LLVM-based compiler.

For those still on the GNU Compiler Collection 9 series for that compiler introduced in 2019, GCC 9.5 was released today as the last planned point release to that compiler.

Building off yesterday's release of the Linux 5.18 kernel, the GNU FSFLA folks have released GNU Linux-Libre 5.18-gnu kernel as their downstream that strips out support for using proprietary microcode/firmware or the ability to load binary-only kernel modules.

Back in 2019 Chinese CPU company Zhaoxin introduced "LuJiaZui" as their 16nm x86 CPU design for use from laptops up through servers. LuJiaZui is much improved from their earlier chips though still well behind AMD and Intel performance. Proper GCC compiler support for LuJiaZui was sent out again this week after their previous upstreaming attempt hadn't made it into GCC 12 due to being late in the cycle.

GCC 12.1 is out today as the first stable release of GCC 12. It also marks 35 years already since the release of GCC 1.0.

Released on Sunday was GDB 12.1 as the newest version of the GNU Debugger.

With GCC 12.1 due for release in roughly the next week or so, Red Hat's Marek Polacek penned a new blog post this week outlining many of the C++ language improvements to be found in this major GNU Compiler Collection update.

The GCC 12 compiler code-base has reached zero P1 regressions (the highest priority) and thus the GCC 12 compiler code has been branched from mainline, a release candidate is imminent, and if all goes well GCC 12.1.0 as the stable release could be out as soon as the end of next week.

While GCC 12 (GCC 12.1 stable) will be out in the coming weeks, GCC 11.3 is out today as the latest stable release in the current GCC 11 series.

The latest GNU C Library (Glibc) development code this week has begun dropping various SSSE3 optimized code paths.

GNU Coreutils 9.1 is out this weekend as the latest feature update to these widely-used core utilities on Linux and other platforms with supplying cp, cat, ls, and other common commands.

Red Hat continues advancing the GNU Compiler Collection's static analysis capabilities. With the upcoming GCC 12 release are yet more improvements to this still-experimental static analyzer.

Over a year ago IBM sent out GCC compiler support for "arch14" that at the time we imagined was for IBM z16. Indeed with IBM having announced their z16 last week, the GCC compiler is now being updated to officially recognize z16 and offer that as an option over the "arch14" naming.

GNU Compiler Collection developers are working towards the stable release of GCC 12 in the next month or so as GCC 12.1. A GCC status report was issued today and there still is just under two dozen regressions of the highest priority (P1) to address or otherwise demote those regressions to lower priority.

The GCC 12 compiler will make its stable introduction in the coming weeks. While under the final "stage 4" development of the compiler focused on regression fixes, a last minute AMD Zen 3 (znver3) tuning tweak has landed.

The GNU C Library (glibc) has landed a set of 23 patches providing optimized AVX2 and EVEX versions of strcasecmp/strncasecmp functions while dropping support for the original AVX implementation.

In continuation of last week's article that the GCC steering committee approved landing of LoongArch as a new port to this MIPS-derived Chinese CPU architecture, the code was merged on Tuesday.

The GCC steering committee has signed off on the LoongArch compiler port and could still land for the GCC 12 stable compiler release in a few weeks.

Introduced back in 2019 by the VIA + Shanghai owned Zhaoxin was the ZX-E / KX-6000 series x86_64 processors. Finally in 2022 the proper GCC compiler tuning support has been published for these processors that are part of the "Lujiazui" microarchitecture.

While GCC 12 is in stage four development and focused just on regression fixes, a few notable patches were merged this week into the codebase ahead of its official release expected in roughly a month or so.

GNU Linux-Libre 5.17 is out as the downstream flavor of Linux 5.17 that strips out code/support depending upon closed-source microcode or other non-free fragments as well as removing the ability to load proprietary kernel modules.

Squeezing into the GCC 12 compiler release is support for the Shadow Call Stack functionality on 64-bit Arm (AArch64).

GNU Binutils 2.38 is out today as the newest feature release to this collection of free software utilities very common to Linux systems and other platforms.

Besides all of the Linux-focused talks at the annual FOSDEM conference, another favorite track of mine is that on micro-kernels and other operating systems. While there wasn't the GNU/Hurd status update in 2022 as there has been in some recent years, there was a talk over GNU/Hurd using NetBSD kernel drivers in order to expand its hardware coverage.

Version 2.35 of the GNU C Library (Glibc) is now available with a variety of changes to this crucial low-level library for Linux systems.

Trisquel 10.0 was released on Tuesday as the latest major release of this operating system that is one of the few GNU/Linux distributions endorsed by the Free Software Foundation. While it has the blessing of the FSF, it's a bit behind on the software feature front.

There sure has been a lot of x86 straight-line speculation happenings in recent months with the compiler-based mitigation being merged for GCC 12 and then beginning with Linux 5.17 the kernel can make use of that new knob for fending off this potential vulnerability. Now the compiler support is even being back-ported to GCC 11.

GCC 12 as this year's annual GNU Compiler Collection feature release has moved on to "stage four" development with likely releasing GCC 12.1 in April.

Disclosed a few months back were "Trojan Source" attacks against compilers where specially crafted code could be rogue but not appear so due to exploiting Unicode issues. Unicode control characters could be used to reorder tokens in source code that could alter the behavior when compiled. With the upcoming GCC 12 compiler release there is a new warning to help point out possible Trojan Source attacks.

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) that serves as the default system compiler on most Linux distributions is nearing its annual update with GCC 12. GCC 12 has been in a general bug fixing period since November while beginning next week will be onto its final phase of focusing just on regression and documentation fixes to the compiler.

Following yesterday's release of Linux 5.16, the GNU folks have released GNU Linux-libre 5.16-gnu as their downstream that removes/disables any code depending upon non-open-source firmware/microcode binaries, the ability to load proprietary kernel modules, and other cleaning in the name of free software.

A small but noteworthy change that landed today for the GCC 12 compiler itself is support for using the Mold linker.

GNU Jami "Taranis" has been released as a major update to this free software project for peer-to-peer communication and SIP-based messaging. GNU Jami is what previously started out as SFLphone and then GNU Ring for initially being focused on softphones.

Glibc 2.35 is introducing the new tunable glibc.malloc.hugetlb that can help with improving system performance for some workloads making use of this tunable, depending upon your kernel's hugepages configuration.

Back in 2018 for the Linux 4.18 kernel was introducing the Restartable Sequences system call for allowing faster user-space operations on per-CPU data. By avoiding atomic operations in cases like incrementing per-CPU counters, modifying per-CPU spinlocks, reading/writing to per-CPU ring buffers, and similar, Restartable Sequences can provide a performance advantage. The GNU C Library is landing its revised support for making use of this system call.

China's Loongson continues bringing up LoongArch processor support for Linux with this MIPS64-based ISA now seeing the complete patch series for review to enable the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC).

Last month I reported on activity around Straight Line Speculation "SLS" mitigation for x86_64 CPUs, similar to the work carried out by Arm last year on their SLS vulnerability. That work on the x86 (x86_64 inclusive) side has now been merged to GCC 12 Git and a kernel patch is expected to come shortly that will flip it on as the latest CPU security protection.

As expected GCC 12 has now entered its "stage 3" development phase where the free software developers involved will focus on bug fixing rather than landing shiny new features.

Patches were recently sent out that implement support for RISC-V's Scalar Cryptography Extension within the GNU Compiler Collection.

A new version of the Ncurses text-based user interface library is now available and most notable is a new but experimental driver for supporting the Windows Terminal.

The GNU Debugger (GDB) has landed native support for OpenRISC on Linux and GDB server support.