Klibc Sees Its First New Release In Five Years

Klibc has seen some new activity recently and that has resulted in the first new release to this minimal standard C library subset in a half-decade.

Klibc 2.0.5 was released this week by Ben Hutchings following a number of commits. The previous Klibc 2.0.4 version was released in July of 2014 and since then has only been sporadic work to this library. The Klibc C library subset is principally used for early in the Linux kernel boot process / initramfs.

Klibc 2.0.5 offers various build/install improvements, explicitly disables PIE (Position Independent Executables), drops the M32R architecture port, i386/x86_64 flags to avoid address collision, adds a RISC-V (RV64) port, and making use of the renameat2() system call. Those changes all landed in klibc just this week.

Going further back in the klibc 2.0.5 development there were a number of MIPS/MIPS64 updates, better handling with ipconfig for multiple network adapters, added support for the accept4 system call, support for mounting non-root file-systems in initramfs-tools, realpath() support, and various other additions.

Those interested in learning more about the current state of klibc can find the new v2.0.5 release and changes outlined via its Git repository.