GNU News Archives

GDB 14.1 has been released today as the newest version of the GNU Debugger for source-level debugging of C/C++, Rust, Fortran, Go, Ada, and other languages.

One of the features that was merged yesterday into the GCC compiler just before shifting to its "bug fixing" phase of development was Intel's AVX10.1 support.

Feature development on GCC 14 is now largely over with today marking the start of their stage three of development that is the "general bugfixing mode" and moving past new features for this next annual GNU Compiler Collection release.

Michal Jires of SUSE posted a new set of patches on Friday for implementing Incremental LTO support for the GNU Compiler Collection. The goal here with Incremental LTO is for reducing compile times while doing quick edit-compile cycles while employing Link-Time Optimizations.

While not as popular as Rust or other languages these days, for COBOL enthusiasts and those continuing to maintain codebases in this 50's programming language, the out-of-tree GCC COBOL compiler support continues to be worked on in late 2023.

While the next revision of the C standard won't see its formal publishing until the 2024 calendar year, the ISO C standards committee already decided on keeping "C23" as the informal name for this next major C update. As such, with today's GCC 14 Git the -std=c23 compiler option for targeting C23 is now honored along with -std=gnu23 for the GNU dialect of C23.

The GCC 14 compiler has merged support for the Zhaoxin Yongfeng processors via the new -march=yongfeng and -mtune=yongfeng compiler options.

Following the Linux 6.6 release, the GNU FSFLA folks are out with their GNU Linux-libre 6.6 downstream that strips out support for proprietary kernel modules, code considered non-free, and other de-blobbing activities in the name of software freedom.

One month from today the GCC 14 feature development is expected to end as the GNU compiler developers transition to the bug-fixing stage.

Just as IBM was posting "future" processor compiler patches in 2019 for what ended up being early POWER10 enablement, they are once again repeating their same compiler enablement technique with sending out "PowerPC future" patches for what is likely to be POWER11.

Following discussions on the GCC mailing list in recent weeks, a GCC security policy was added for the GNU Compiler Collection codebase to outline the compiler project's security process.

A nasty vulnerability has been made public today concerning Glibc's dynamic loader that can lead to full root privileges being obtained by local users. This affects Linux distributions of the past two years with the likes of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, 23.04, Fedora 38, and others vulnerable to this local privilege escalation issue.

GNU Binutils has added support for the ARCv3 32-bit and 64-bit CPU architecture.

When it comes to Glibc HWCAPs for allowing the C library to load optimized libraries based upon the CPU features at run-time, it's mostly been focused on the x86_64 world for targeting higher x86-64 levels or being able to load optimized libraries for systems with AVX support. Loongson though has now contributed initial LoongArch HWCAPs support.

Following discussions among compiler developers and other stakeholders, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is preparing to add a "-fhardened" compiler option that will enable various hardening features aimed at increasing the security/robustness of the generated binaries.

Back in July Intel announced AVX10 as the future of AVX-512 and how they ultimately plan to support more Advanced Vector Extensions capabilities on both future P and E cores. Since then they've begun making preparations to the open-source compiler toolchains around enabling AVX10.

The first release candidate of the inaugural GNU Boot has been released with users sought to try out this fork of Libreboot that in turn is derived from Coreboot.

Released at the end of August was GNU Coreutils 9.4 while out this weekend is uutils 0.0.21 as the open-source, Rust-written re-implementation of the Coreutils utilities.

GNU Coreutils 9.4 is out today as the latest version of this collection of utilities common to GNU/Linux systems and other platforms.

A few days ago Intel compiler expert H.J. Lu landed an FMA-optimized log2 function for the GNU C Library that could yield up to a 69% performance improvement on tested Intel Skylake processors. Merged today to Glibc Git was another FMA-optimized function.

Intel engineer and open-source compiler expert H.J. Lu has landed a much faster log2() implementation within the GNU C Library (glibc) that makes use of FMA instructions with modern x86_64 CPUs.

Developers of the BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system have long been carrying patches for supporting the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) on their platform while this week the code was upstreamed for GCC 14.

Following the release this weekend of GNU Binutils 2.41, another important GNU software project just issued their latest update: the GNU C Library 2.38.

GNU Binutils 2.41 is out today as the latest major update to this important collection of binary utilities present on most Linux systems and other platforms.

GNU Emacs 29.1 is out this morning as the latest update to this popular and powerful text editor.

For those fond of the COBOL programming language and continuing to make use of it in new development efforts, GnuCOBOL 3.2 was released on Friday as the latest feature update for this 21+ year old free software effort around being an open-source COBOL implementation.

Released back in April was GCC 13.1 as the first stable release in the GCC 13 series that brought Modula-2 language support, more C++23/C23 features, and other new CPU targets supported from Arm to Intel. Debuting today is GCC 13.2 as the first point release in the series to ship dozens of bug fixes.

GNU Shepherd is the Guile-written service manager for handling daemons that is most notably used by the GNU Guix project as an alternative to the likes of SysV and systemd. With today's GNU Shepherd 0.10.2 some long-standing issues have finally been resolved.

GNU Boot 20230717 has been released as the fork of Libreboot that in turn is a downstream of Coreboot focused on providing system firmware support only where they are fully free software. With GNU Boot the game is upped further by removing select motherboard ports and documentation where they do not comply with the GNU System Distribution Guidelines.

GRUB 2.12 had been talked about for a mid-2022 release while one year later we are finally greeted by the first release candidate for this next major open-source bootloader release.

For those on the three-year-old GCC 10 compiler series, it's really time to move to a newer GNU Compiler Collection release for enjoying the latest language support, new hardware features, various optimizations, enhanced diagnostics, and more. But for those still bound to GCC 10 for whatever reason, GCC 10.5 was released today as one final update in the branch.

GNU Binutils 2.41 was branched today in its Git repository in preparations for releasing this collection of binary utilities widely relied upon by Linux and other platforms.

The in-development GCC 14 compiler has added support for the MIPS16e2 processor ISA.

Following yesterday's release of Linux 6.4, the FSFLA team has released GNU Linux-libre 6.4-gnu as the newest version of this downstream kernel that aims for "100% freedom" with removing any kernel remnants that depend upon non-free-software microcode/firmware or other binary blobs as well as removing the ability to load proprietary kernel modules.

Similar to LLVM Clang 17 adding -std=c++26 support as the open-source compiler begins work on the next major revision of the C++ programming language, the GCC 14 compiler code has now also added the -std=c++26 compiler option.

While a few years late compared to many other open-source projects adopting a Code of Conduct, the GCC Steering Committee has now adopted a Code of Conduct "CoC" for this open-source compiler project.

Stemming from looking at the generated x264 video encode binary and some performance inefficiencies, SUSE engineers have worked out AVX-512 fully masked vectorization support for the GCC 14 development code.

While GCC 13 saw its first stable release several weeks back, for those taking their time in moving to major new compiler releases and still relying on the two-year-old GCC 11 series, out today is the GCC 11.4 point release.

The GNU Assembler "Gas" as part of the GNU Binutils collection has landed support for Intel FRED and LKGS instructions.

With development of the MIPS architecture having officially ended two years ago in favor of focusing on RISC-V for future CPU designs and the overall decline of that CPU architecture, it's been years since the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has seen its MIPS code well maintained. However, now a capable developer has stepped up willing to serve as the GCC maintainer for MIPS.

GNU Shepherd 0.10 is out today as the latest release for this GNU-backed service manager and init system that is written in Guile.

While GCC 13.1 recently released as the first major stable release of the GCC 13 series, for those continuing to depend upon last year's GCC 12 stable series there is a new point release available today.

Dragora remains one of the few Linux distributions endorsed by the Free Software Foundation and is a from-scratch distribution focused on providing only free software... The last stable release of the Linux distribution was Dragora 2.2 back in 2012 while out today is Dragora 3.0 Beta 2, which itself is coming three and a half years since the prior beta.

GCC 13.1 has been released as the first stable version of GCC 13 as this annual feature release to the GNU Compiler Collection.

As expected following the GCC 13 release branching this week, the first release candidate of what will be the premiere GCC 13.1 stable release is now available.

The GNU Compiler Collection 13 codebase has no more P1 bugs, which are regressions of the highest priority, and as such the GCC 13 codebase was branched today with plans of issuing GCC 13.1-rc1 likely in the next day and hopefully releasing GCC 13.1 as the first stable release of the GCC 13 series next week.

Earlier this week Intel sent out AMX-COMPLEX support for the GCC compiler as a new instruction set extension for Xeon Scalable Granite Rapids. That enablement work was already merged for the imminent GCC 13 release while now AMX-COMPLEX support has also been added to GNU Binutils.

While the release of GCC 13.1 as the first stable GCC 13 compiler is due out in the next few weeks, ahead of that milestone dozens of Rust "gccrs" patches were merged today for furthering along that new language support.

Going back to late 2021 was the initial GCC compiler patch for "Ampere-1" for that next-gen AArch64 server processor while last year this successor to Ampere Altra (Max) was formally announced under the AmpereOne brand. That initial compiler support appeared in GCC 12 while ahead of the GCC 13 release in the coming weeks has been some last minute tuning for the AmpereOne cost table.

While GCC 13 is working its way toward its official GCC 13.1 stable release in the next few weeks, with this week's openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling-release updates it has already begun switching over to this major annual compiler update.