Binutils 2.31 Slated For Fedora 29

To little surprise given that Fedora Linux always strives to ship with a bleeding-edge GNU toolchain, for the Fedora 29 release this fall they are planning to make use of the yet-to-be-released Binutils 2.31.

Fedora 29 is looking to employ Binutils 2.31 since it should be out in time for the October release of this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution. Their main incentive to get Binutils 2.31 in Fedora 29 is for a linker change allowing the loader to mark code segments as read-only, which can help out on the security front.

Binutils 2.31 has also been working on support for disassembling netronome Flow Processor (NFP) firmware files, various ARM64/AArch64 port improvements, Freescale S12Z architecture support in the GAS assembler, support in the x86 assembler to enable alternate shorter instruction encoding, and faster direct linking with DLLs for Cygwin/Mingw targets.

More details on Fedora's plans for Binutils 2.31 can be found via this Wiki page.