GNU Binutils 2.40 Released With AMD Zen 4 & Upcoming Intel Instructions, Zstd Support

Out today is GNU Binutils 2.40 as the latest feature update to this wide collection of key binary utilities found on Linux systems and other platforms.

GNU Binutils 2.40 adds AMD Zen 4 CPU support, support for instructions on upcoming Intel processors, Zstd compression support as part of the rest of the GNU toolchain embracing Zstandard, and a lot more. Some of the Binutils 2.40 highlights include:

- The objdump utility adds a "--show-all-symbols" option for displaying all symbols that match a given address when disassembling rather than just printing only the first match.

- There is now a "--enable-colored-disassembly" option when configuring the Binutils build to optionally enable colored output support when running within the terminal. Colored output is disabled by default.

- Objcopy's --decompress-debug-sections now supports dealing with Zstd compressed debug sections. Similarly, the --compress-debug-sections=zstd is now supported for using Zstd to compress debug sections. Additionally, addr2line and objdump --dwarf now support Zstd compressed debug sections too.

- The readelf and objdump commands now has a "--sframe" option for dumping SFrame sections.

- GNU Gold now supports Zstd-compressed debug sections.

- The linker also adds -w / --no-warnings options to suppress the generation of any warnings or error messages if there is a need to create a known, non-working binary.

- AMD Zen 4 "znver4" support.

The GNU Assembler (Gas) with Binutils 2.40 adds:

- Support for many new Intel x86_64 instructions including RAO-INT, AVX-NE-CONVERT, MSRLIST, WRMSRNS, CMPccXADD. AVX-VNNI-INT8, AVX-IFMA, PREFETCHI, and AMX-FP16.

- Similar to the other Binutils changes for supporting Zstd compression, Gas now supports Zstd compressed debug sections.

- Support for various T-Head extensions found on the Allwinner D1 RISC-V SoC.

- Support for the RISC-V Zawrs extension, which is the "Wait-on-Reservation-Set" extension for used in polling loops that allows a core to enter a low-power state and wait on a store to a memory location.

- Support for the Arm Cortex-X1C.

- The new Gas "--gsframe" option can be used for generating SFrame unwind information on x86_64 and AArch64.

The GNU Binutils 2.40 release announcement can be read on the mailing list.