Seemingly at first thinking it was just an April Fools' Day joke, but it turns out the GNU Guix developers responsible for their package manager and operating system are actually working to replace their Linux (GNU Linux-libre to be exact) kernel with GNU Hurd.

While GCC 10 isn't even out for a few more weeks, looking ahead to next year's GCC 11 release is already one interesting planned change.

Following last night's release of Linux 5.6, the GNU FSFLA folks have put out the Linux-libre 5.6-gnu kernel as their fully-free-software kernel that disallows loading binary kernel modules, disables functionality requiring closed-source firmware/microcode, and other aspects to ensure only free software code is running on the system.

One of many new features in the GCC 10 code compiler releasing in about one month's time is finally having a built-in static analyzer. This static analyzer can be enabled with the -fanalyzer switch and has been maturing nicely for its initial capabilities in the GNU Compiler Collection 10.

Introduced into the Linux 4.18 kernel back in June 2018 was the new RSEQ system call for "Restartable Sequences" to provide faster user-space operations on per-CPU data by avoiding atomic operations updates. Sadly, seeing user-space make use of RSEQ has been a slow process.

GNU Automake 1.16.2 is out this weekend as the first update to this important piece of the GNU build system in two years. While such length of time has passed, Automake 1.16.2 is only made up of just over three dozen commits.

The GNU Debugger (GDB) is seeing the start of improvements to enhance its Microsoft Windows debugging experience.

Following last week's release of GCC 8.4, the GCC 9.3 compiler is out in offering the latest fixes to the newer (and current) GCC 9 compiler series.

Yesterday the Load Value Injection (LVI) vulnerability was disclosed by Intel and researchers and affecting newer Intel CPUs with SGX and requiring mitigations outside of all the speculative execution mitigations the past two years. The GNU Assembler patches adding new options for mitigation have now been merged to Git master.

For those making use of the GCC 8 compiler series, GCC 8.4 is out with all of the bug fixes collected since GCC 8.3's release in February of last year.

GCC 8.4 will hopefully be released next week but for now a release candidate is available for testing the latest bug fixes in the mature GCC8 series.

Debuginfod is the Red Hat led debug information HTTP web server distributed as part of elfutils and able to supply on-demand source code and ELF/DWARF debug files to debuggers / IDEs / other compiler tooling. The GDB debugger can now tap debuginfod for on-demand source files and debug information that isn't present on the local system.

The Free Software Foundation is planning to launch their own public code hosting and collaboration platform in 2020.

As part of clearing up the relationship between the FSF and GNU and seeking to add more clarity to the GNU Project, Richard Stallman has announced a document outlining the structure and administration of the project.

While GCC 10 will be releasing in the next month or two as the annual feature update to the GNU Compiler Collection, GCC 8.4 is expected for release soon along with GCC 9.3.

With C++20 now effectively complete, GCC developers have made a rather late change for GCC 10 that is also long overdue and that is introducing the -std=c++20 switch for targeting C++20.

Out this weekend is GDB 9.1 as the newest feature update to the GNU Debugger.

Following last year's resignation of Richard Stallman from the Free Software Foundation under public pressure but remaining as head of the GNU Project for these tight-knit organizations, the two organizations have needed to figure out how to cooperate moving forward.

Two important pieces of the GNU toolchain saw new releases to kickoff February.

GNU C Library 2.31 (Glibc 2.31) should be releasing in the days ahead and is now under a hard freeze for this next feature release to this important libc implementation.

We've seen a lot of odd products pick up the Free Software Foundation's "Respect Your Freedom" endorsement like a USB microphone, various re-branded motherboards, and even last year certified a USB to parallel printer cable. The latest product they are endorsing -- and their first endorsement of 2020 -- is a USD 802.11 a/b/g/n PCIe half-mini card starting out at $59 USD but going up to $79 for this outdated wireless adapter.

While a Red Hat developer is working on "Goals" to try to improve upon Make, the GNU Make project is not slowing down and is out this Sunday with a big update.

GNU Binutils 2.34 has been branched off in preparing for the upcoming release of this important set of "binary utilities" to the GNU compiler toolchain. Most interesting with Binutils 2.34 is in fact an optional HTTP server support for enhancing the developer/debugging experience.

As of this morning experimental support for C++20 coroutines has been merged into the GCC 10 compiler!

GNU Guile 3.0 has been released, the GNU's implementation of the Scheme programming language with various extra features. The big news with Guile 3.0 is better performance.

Within GCC's newly minted Git repository is a big last minute feature for the GCC 10 release: a long-awaited static analyzer.

Following the long-awaited GCC transition from SVN to Git that took place this weekend, the GNU Compiler Collection is kicking off this week by transitioning to "stage four" development on the GCC 10 compiler.

I reported a few days ago GCC was hoping to transition to Git this weekend from their large SVN repository. Going into this weekend I wasn't going to be the least bit surprised if this transition got delayed again given all of the months of delays already, but actually, they went ahead and migrated to Git!

A big change merged to the GNU Debugger (GDB) code-base on Friday is support for multi-target debugging support.

The GRUB boot-loader has finally merged support for dealing with LUKS2 encrypted disks.