Glibc 2.27 Is Being Released Soon With Numerous Performance Optimizations

Glibc 2.27 will be released as soon as next week as the latest half-year update to the GNU C Library.

The Glibc 2.27 cycle has been very heavy on performance optimizations. As covered recently, there's been AVX2/FMA optimizations, other optimized functions, numerous FMA optimizations, and more. Long story short, if you're running a recent AMD/Intel x86_64 CPU, there are chances you could see good performance improvements out of Glibc 2.27.

Intel developers have contributed a bulk of the optimizations for Glibc 2.27. Many of these optimizations were also work done by Intel and backported already to their Clear Linux distribution, so now these performance improvements can find their ways to other distributions.

But even if you aren't an x86_64 user, there has also been some POWER memory copy optimizations, various AArch64/ARMv8 optimizations, and even some SPARC M7 love too by other developers.

Glibc 2.27 also has support for memory protection keys. Glibc can also now be built with support for building static PIE executables, memfd_create support, and various fixes.

The Glibc developers do actively maintain the NEWS entry for those wanting to see the work-in-progress change-log for the imminent Glibc 2.27 release coming as soon as the first of February. But when Linux distributions begin shipping with Glibc 2.27 is another story...