Werner Koch announced the availability today of GnuPG 2.3 as the start of the (fairly stable, effectively production ready) test releases leading up to the GnuPG 2.4 stable update.

GCC 10.3 is out today as the latest stable release of the GNU Compiler Collection, weeks ahead of the GCC 11.1 feature release as the first stable version of GCC 11.

While GCC 11 is seeing its first stable release in the form of GCC 11.1 in just a few short weeks, GCC 10.3 is imminent as the latest point release for those on the current GCC 10 stable series.

In addition to the last minute AMD Zen 3 "znver3" tuning in GCC 11, also landing rather late are scheduling updates for the GNU Compiler Collection around the IBM POWER10 processor target.

Patches have been proposed for the GCC compiler to ultimately allow MinGW Windows executables to be debugged with Microsoft's debuggers.

Just weeks ahead of the GCC 11 stable release we saw Znver3 tuning work out of SUSE for allowing the GNU Compiler Collection to better cater towards the AMD Zen 3 microarchitecture. That tuning work follows the initial patch at the end of last year that introduced "Znver3" and flipped on the new instructions. Now another patch working on the Zen 3 tuning for GCC has been posted and already merged.

GRUB 2.06 was originally anticipated for release in 2020 but then the BootHole security vulnerability foiled those plans. This long awaited bootloader update though is near with GRUB 2.06-RC1 being issued on Friday and plans to formally release it in about one month's time.

With the exciting "HWCAPS" feature of Glibc 2.33+ allowing for optimized versions of libraries to be more easily deployed on Linux systems, diagnosing issues around it can be a bit more complicated but on the way for Glibc 2.34 is a welcome improvement to help in such issues.

GCC compiler patches began appearing this morning for IBM Z "Arch14" as a future architecture extension for their Z mainframe processors. IBM Z Arch14 will likely correlate to IBM z16.

The newest GNU project seeing its first release is GNU Poke, which is being inaugurated at v1.0 after being in development for the past three years.

An Oracle engineer has proposed introducing a new "-ftrivial-auto-var-init=" option for the GCC compiler that would allowing initializing automatic variables with either a pattern or zeroes in the name of security.

Building off yesterday's release of the Linux 5.11 kernel, the GNU folks have put out their "GNU Linux-libre 5.11-gnu" kernel that removes support for loading closed-source kernel modules, stripping out drivers/functionality that are dependent upon closed-source microcode/firmware, and other sanitization work in the name of maintaining a fully free software system.

While GRUB 2.06 was aiming for release in 2020, having to deal with the BootHole security issue among other challenges last year ended up delaying that release. Fortunately, it looks like this long awaited GRUB feature update should be out this year and there has been increased cooperation between upstream GRUB developers and distribution vendors.

The GNU Network Utilities (inetutils) has seen its first major release in nine years or even the first release at all in six years since the prior point release. With GNU inetutils 2.0 are several updates to common programs like ping and ifconfig.

The GNU C Library 2.33 release is out today as expected. Exciting with this libc update is HWCAPS in making it easier to load optimized libraries for modern CPUs.

Added to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) last year was an integrated static analyzer via the "-fanalyzer" option for spotting potential code issues. For GCC 10 this integrated static analyzer operating off GCC's GIMPLE was in good shape for catching various bugs while for the upcoming GCC 11 it is now much more capable.

While most Linux users likely don't get excited when hearing of a new Glibc release, version 2.33 of the GNU C Library is due to be released next week and it's pretty darn interesting for having the new HWCAPS functionality in opening up for more optimized out-of-the-box Linux performance moving forward.

GNU Parted 3.4 is out as the first update to this open-source partition editor in sixteen months.

A late change to GCC 11 is recognizing the -std=c++23 compiler option but without actually enabling any new features of this next major version of the C++ programming language.

GNU Binutils 2.36 is out today as the latest version of this collection of binary utilities for Linux/open-source systems.

With the upcoming GCC 11 compiler release the GNU compiler's just-in-time (JIT) library is no longer considered to be of alpha quality.

GCC 11 entered its final stage of development today as it works towards releasing around the end of Q1 / early Q2 if their past cadence holds up. Before GCC 11.1 can debut as the first stable version, there are some 60+ "P1" high priority regressions that need to be resolved or otherwise demoted to lesser priority regressions.

Given the talk in prior days around patches for PGO'ing the Linux kernel and some readers not being familiar with Profile Guided Optimizations by code compilers, here are some fresh benchmarks on a Ryzen 9 5950X looking at the benefits of applying PGO optimizations to various benchmarks.

GCC 11 is slated to enter "Stage 4" development at the end of this weekend after which only regression and documentation fixes will be permitted. The first GCC 11 stable release should be out in 2~3 months, but at the moment there is an increasing number of P1 regressions that are of the highest priority.

The GNU Project had a very active year with the GNU toolchain in particular continuing to make major strides in punctually supporting new C/C++ features, continuing to enhance device offloading / accelerator support, support new CPU features, and more. GCC also saw its conversion this year finally over to Git among other accomplishments by the large number of GNU software projects.

Libmicrohttpd as the GNU project's embedded HTTP web server library is out with a final release of 2020.

GNU Bash 5.1 was released on Monday as the newest feature release to this popular POSIX shell implementation with many extra features.

GNU Guix 1.2 is out today as both an update to the cross-platform package manager as well as the Guix System Linux distribution.

As was expected, formal feature development is now over for GCC 11 and it's time for bug fixing.

GCC 11 feature development is ending very shortly but landing in time are the patches last month for adding AVX-VNNI support.