Hot off the release of the upstream Linux 4.18 kernel, the GNU folks have released GNU Linux-libre 4.18-gnu that is their deblobbed version that strips out any "non-free" device driver support, removes the ability to load binary-only kernel modules and not being able to load firmware blobs either.

One of the interesting GNU projects that doesn't receive as much attention as others is GNU Ring that is a decentralized communication platform vying to be like Skype and WhatsApp but for open-source and privacy-minded users. The related Ring-KDE project put out their version 3.0 release that is a significant rewrite to this KDE/Qt interface to Ring.

After being available for the past few months in patch form, ARM's work on "-mtrack-speculation" to provide speculation tracking is now within the mainline GCC 9.0 compiler code-base.

Glibc 2.28, the latest update to the GNU C Library, is now available to start off the month of August.

Remember earlier this month when GCC's long in the works conversion from SVN to Git was being held up by the lack of RAM on Eric S Raymond's system? Well, it turns out that's just part of the problem.

ARM's Richard Earnshaw has posted a revised version for their months-in-development patch-set for mitigating against unsafe data speculation by the GCC code compiler. This new Spectre V1 mitigation for ARM 64-bit would be exposed via a new -mtrack-speculation compiler switch.

Jakub Jelinek of Red Hat today announced the relase of GCC 8.2 stable as the first point relase to the stable GCC 8 compiler that debuted earlier this year.

C-SKY is the 32-bit embedded CPU architecture developed in Hangzhou, China for the CK610/CK807/CK810/CK860 cores, among others.

GCC 8.2 as the first point release to the stable GCC 8 compiler is tentatively set to debut next Thursday, 26 July, but available now for testing is the release candidate.

A SUSE developer is seeking feedback and interest on the possibility of allowing a scripting language -- most likely Python -- to be used within the GCC compiler code-base. This would primarily be used for replacing existing AWK scripts.

Landing yesterday in Glibc for Intel's Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) were the instructions for Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) and Shadow Stack (SHSTK).

The GCC 8 compiler brought the Synopsys ARC CPU target while for the GCC 9 release is going to be support for the company's HS4x processors.

A new release of the Binutils collection of important tools is now available with a number of new features and improvements.

The other day we reported on a GCC 8 regression where Skylake and newer CPUs with "-march=native" haven't been performance as optimally as they should be. Fortunately, that patch was quickly landed into the GCC SVN/Git code for GCC 9 as well as back-ported to GCC 8.

Developers behind the GNU Compiler Collection intend to get release preparations underway soon for the GCC 8.2 compiler.

It turns out that when using GCC 8 since April (or GCC 9 development code) if running on Intel Skylake (or newer architectures like the yet-to-be-out Cannonlake or Icelake) and compile your code with the "-march=native" flag for what should tune for your CPU microarchitecture's full capabilities, that hasn't entirely been the case. A fix is en route that can correct the performance by as much as 60%.

After converting the GNU Emacs repository to Git a few years back, Eric S Raymond has been working on the massive undertaking of transferring the GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) repository in full over to Git. But the transition to GCC Git is being hampered since due to the massive size of the repository, Raymond's system is running under extreme memory pressure with 64GB of RAM.

GNU Guix 0.15 is out today as the latest feature update to this transactional package manager and is joined by an updated Guix System Distribution (GuixSD) release too as the GNU Linux-libre distribution built around it.

While the GCC compiler merged its RISC-V port last year, among its limitations have been not supporting the Ada compiler. That's now changing thanks to new patches posted today.

In addition to working on statx() for glibc, landing in the GNU C Library this week was Unicode 11.0 support along with a renameat2() function.

The first half of 2018 was certainly eventful for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) with the stable release of GCC8, feature development on GCC9 kicking off, and all the associated fun.

Red Hat developer Florian Weimer sent out a patch this week adding the statx function to the GNU C Library (glibc).

We are now half-way through 2018 and the work on GNU Hurd and related components like GNU March have been very light.

One of the advantages of the LLVM Clang compiler has been better integration with Bash completion support, but now the GCC compiler supports a --completion argument for feeding into the Bash completion script with better matching of supported options/values when typing into a supported terminal.

When it comes to obscure projects under the official GNU Project umbrella, GNU FreeDink is one of them as being a free software game whose lineage traces back to the Dink Smallwood title from the late 90's. Nearly twenty years after the game's original release, the latest GNU FreeDink release is now available that allows it to be played within web-browsers.

Patches exist for taking the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) to yet another processor.

The MIPS P6600 processor was announced in 2015 as one of the Warrior Processors based upon MIPS64 Release 6. The P6600 is based on a 28nm process, clock speeds up to 2.0GHz, and is the fastest performing of the MIPS Warrior cores. Only now has MIPS posted an enablement patch for the MIPS P6600 with GCC.

Support for Intel Memory Protection Extensions (MPX) is now pretty much dead on Linux.

If you want a laptop or convertible tablet that "respects your freedoms" at all costs with the hardware freed down to the BIOS and don't mind running on outdated hardware to accomplish that goal, the Free Software Foundation has now certified the Minifree X200 that is a refurbished model of the decade-old Lenovo X200 as being "RYF" compliant.

Longtime GNU toolchain developer at Red Hat, David Malcolm, has announced the work he is pursuing on compiler-assisted performance analysis with GCC.