The GNU toolchain has already been preparing for Cooperlake CPUs as the successor to Cascadelake as well as supporting the new instruction set extensions, but finally today the support for -march=cooperlake was merged to GCC 10 for conveniently exposing the new CPU target in the GNU Compiler Collection. At the same time, -march=tigerlake was also added.

The GNU toolchain crew released today GCC 9.2 as the newest stable release to their compiler stack.

After being in development for more than six years, GNU Radio 3.8 is now available and is in fact considered a minor release update.

The GNU Compiler Collection 9.2 release should be out next Monday while until then a release candidate was issued today for testing.

Currently when passing "-flto" for enabling Link-Time Optimizations with the GCC compiler, it defaults to using a single core/thread for carrying out the optimizations and code generation. There has been support for specifying a number of threads to use for carrying out this link-time work in parallel while finally in GCC 10 that is being enabled by default.

Merged for the GCC 9 compiler release that launched earlier this year was the preliminary AMD Radeon "GCN" GPU compiler back-end. In that initial release it wasn't particularly useful as the GPU offloading bits for the popular programming APIs/models wasn't supported so for now could just run some basic single-threaded programs. But now those interesting GPU offloading bits are pending for GCC 10.

Releasing on schedule was the GNU C Library 2.30 release. Glibc 2.30 brings with it more optimizations and new features for this all-important part of the GNU toolchain.

Last week I wrote about the GCC 10 compiler picking up a new scheduler model and cost tables for AMD Zen 2 CPUs to build off the initial "znver2" microarchitecture target from last year. Fortunately, those Znver2-specific improvements have now been back-ported to the GCC 9 compiler branch so it will see user systems with not as long of a wait until GCC 10 stable.

The gNewSense that is based on Debian GNU/Linux but comprised entirely of free software without any non-free software support is now without a maintainer.

When it comes to open-source processor ISAs, RISC-V currently captures much of the spotlight but OpenRISC continues chugging along as another open-source CPU architecture. The OpenRISC GCC compiler back-end and other software tooling also continues to move along for this architecture that's been in the works since 2000.

While there is another nineteen years to go until the Year 2038 problem manifests, the GNU C Library "glibc" is one of the key software components still needing some fixes for this issue where this problem where storing the Unix time as a 32-bit signed integer will wrap around and become a negative number.

Following last night's Linux 5.2 kernel release, the GNU folks maintaining their GNU Linux-libre off-shoot that de-blobs the kernel of being able to load binary-only firmware/microcode files or the ability to load binary-only kernel modules is out with their re-based kernel.

As a follow-up to the story about GCC eyeing Zstd compression for its LTO data, that support has now been merged into the GCC 10 code compiler.

It's been two years since the release of GRUB 2.02 while today it's finally been replaced by the long-awaited GRUB 2.04 bootloader release.

GNU Rush 2.0 is out today as the latest major update to this restricted user shell that allows administrators greater control over the command line support exposed to users as well as system resource control and running remote programs within a chroot.

Back in April we wrote about a proposal for providing better parallelization within GCC itself to address use-cases such as very large source files. That effort was accepted as part of this year's Google Summer of Code and the student developer pursing this parallelization with threads has issued his first progress report.

Similar to the recent LLVM compiler work, the in-development GCC 10 compiler also now has support for the AVX-512 VP2INTERSECT instructions being introduced on Intel Tiger Lake CPUs.

A new "-O1g" optimization level has been proposed for the GNU Compiler Collection that would allow better performance but still relative ease for debugging the generated binaries.

The latest use-case for the increasingly popular Zstd compression algorithm could be employment by the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for compressing its link-time optimization (LTO) data.

New to the GCC 10 compiler code-base this week is a port for the Texas Instruments Programmable Real-Time Unit (PRU) processor found on various boards, including the likes of the BeagleBone Arm SBCs.

Ranger is the on-demand ranger generator being worked on for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) by Red Hat's compiler experts for the past several years. Following a recent update on the effort, it looks like Ranger might land for next year's GCC 10 release after failing to make it in time for GCC 9.

The bleeding-edge Arch Linux distribution has resorted to dropping the GCC 9.1 compiler from testing due to a data corruption bug.

Continuing on with our benchmarks this month of the newly-released GCC 9 compiler, here are some additional numbers for the AVX-512-enabled Intel Core i9 7980XE processor on Ubuntu Linux when testing tuning for various AVX widths.

The GNU Binutils is finally getting wired up around the Extended BPF (eBPF) as the modern, in-kernel virtual machine that stretches the Berkeley Packet Filter beyond the networking subsystem.

IBM engineers have landed initial support for "-mcpu=future" into the GCC compiler... As they say in the commit message, "a future architecture level, as yet unnamed."

It looks like the saga of converting the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) source tree from SVN to Git isn't over yet and could still take months until completion.

The GCC 10 code compiler merged support to begin emulating MMX intrinsics using SSE.

The lengthy battle of converting the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) to using a Git workflow from SVN might be getting closer to finally culminating... Linaro developer Maxim Kuvyrkov has jumped on the task of converting the GCC repository from SVN to Git and did so without much fuss.

The big GDB 8.3 feature release was just announced by Joel Brobecker. This update to the GNU Debugger comes with many improvements and new features for assisting developers.

Longtime GCC developer Honza Hubička of SUSE has posted a lengthy and quite interesting blog post concerning some of the optimization work that went into the now-released GCC 9 compiler. It turns out some of the GCC 9 optimization work was motivated by the Firefox developers and their desire to switch to LLVM Clang in the name of performance. Separately, openSUSE Tumbleweed has been looking at using link-time optimizations (LTO) by default for their packages and that has also motivated developers and help ensured the LTO support was in good shape for this annual compiler release.