GNU Binutils 2.26: Linker Gets Experimental Garbage Collection, LLVM Plugin Support

GNU Binutils 2.26 has been released as the first major release in more than one year since Binutils 2.25.

This collection of binary tools was updated this week and the release announcement sent out this morning. In digging through the Git change-log and then the Bintutils NEWS, libmpx is now enabled by default, more patches from GCC mainline were imported, some new configure switches added, there is now support for the ARC EM/HS and ARC600/ARC700 architectures, objcopy improvements, and more.

With the GNU assembler there is support for ARMv8.1 in ARM/AArch64 and compress-debug-sections is now on by default for Linux/x86. In ld (the GNU linker) there is support for the LLVM plugin, experimental support for linker garbage collection is enabled for COFF and PE based targets, and other new command-line options. The garbage collection work is mentioned in more detail via the options documentation with the --gc-sections switch.

More details can be found via the project's site at GNU.org.