GNU C Library 2.34 Released With More Functionality Squeezed Into libc

Written by Michael Larabel in GNU on 2 August 2021 at 05:53 AM EDT. 10 Comments
GNU
Version 2.34 of the GNU C Library (glibc) is now available with a wide variety of changes that accumulated over the past six months.

Glibc 2.34 is now available and ready to begin appearing with forthcoming Linux distribution updates. Among the many changes to find with GNU C Library 2.34 are:

- All functionality formerly implemented in libpthread, libdl, libutil, and libanl has been integrated into the libc library itself. Empty static archives of these former libraries are still provided so as to not be too disruptive of a change with applications moving forward only needing to link against libc.

- Support for 64-bit time_t on configurations like 32-bit x86. Time_t still defaults to 32-bit on such configurations for now but might change in the future.

- A new Glibc tunable on Linux to allow configuring the size of the thread stack cache.

- _Fork has been added as an async-signal-safe fork replacement.

- Support on Linux for close_range function to efficiently close a range of file descriptors when running on modern versions of the Linux kernel.

- Support for dynamic sized register sets for modern CPU features like Arm SVE.

- Support for the ISO C2X function timespec_getres.

- More helpful linker diagnostics.

- Several security fixes and other bug fixes.

Moving forward, Glibc has gone ahead and dropped its FSF copyright assignment policy.

More details as to the prominent Glibc 2.34 changes can be found via its release announcement.
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