Sailfish OS "Hossa" Upgrades From The Old eglibc 2.19, But Still Relying On GCC 4

Jolla released Sailfish OS 3.0.3 "Hossa" as the newest feature update to their mobile Linux OS. With this update they've begun a number of much-needed low-level improvements to their platform.

With Sailfish OS 3.0.3 they have moved on from the ancient eglibc 2.19 release to at least the newer glibc 2.25 while they are now working on moving to glibc 2.28 following this 3.0.3 release. As part of the C library upgrade they also updated systemd, QEMU, libdrm, Gzip, Automake, Bison, and many other packages.

On the system compiler front, they were also looking to move past their long-used GCC 4.8 compiler. But as an interim stepping stone they have now switched to GCC 4.9 for this new release. Ultimately they are planning to ship a much newer version of the GNU Compiler Collection but they are working incrementally in that direction.

Another upgrade was for their browser engine to which they moved to Mozilla's Gecko ESR 45 series. Also with this Sailfish OS update they are finally plumbing NFC (Near Field Communication) support into their stack.

More details on Sailfish OS Hossa via the Jolla blog.