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.

With C++20 one of the major features added is that of modules as a modern alternative to that of conventional C++ header files for packages. The C++20 modules code for the GNU Compiler Collection that has been in the works for several years is now under review and could potentially still land for the GCC 11 release next year.

The Linux x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels have taken shape this year for different feature/performance levels based on a CPU's capabilities. Both LLVM Clang 12 and GCC 11 are ready to go in offering the new x86-64-v2, x86-64-v3, and x86-64-v4 targets.

GDB 10.1 is now shipping as a big update to the GNU Debugger.

The GNU Compiler Collection 11 (GCC 11) will be ending stage one development in mid-November to get the release process underway.

Within hours of Linus Torvalds releasing the Linux 5.9 kernel, the GNU folks maintaining the GNU Linux-libre downstream released their version of the kernel that prevents the loading of binary-only modules as well as the loading of binary-only firmware/microcode blobs.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) announced on Thursday that they are funding improvements to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) around GPU compute offloading.

One of the most interesting projects out of Google Summer of Code 2020 has been the ongoing work for allowing individual code files to be compiled in parallel, building off work last year in addressing GCC parallelization bottlenecks. The final report for GSoC 2020 on this work has been issued.

While LLVM's Clang C/C++ compiler was traditionally known for its faster build speeds than GCC, in recent releases of GCC the build speeds have improved and in some areas LLVM/Clang has slowed down with further optimization passes and other work added to its growing code-base. As it stands right now, GCC is faster than Clang at compiling the Linux kernel.

At the GNU Tools Track during this week's Linux Plumbers Conference was an interesting talk by Red Hat's Ben Woodard. He shares his perspective on how the GNU dynamic linker (ld.so) could be ripe for an overhaul in the 2020's.

For a number of years the GNU Compiler Collection has shipped experimental support for the DWARF 5 debugging data format while finally for next year's GCC 11 release it might be deemed stable and used by default.

For the past two summers student developer Giuliano Belinassi has been working under Google Summer of Code in working to address GCC parallelization bottlenecks and ultimately a goal of allowing single source files to be split up for compilation in parallel by GCC. In particular, being able to split the compilation of large source files across multiple CPU cores. The latest patches on this "-fparallel-jobs=" was sent out today as we approach the end of GSoC 2020.

If looking for a text editor that offers more features than the recent release of Nano 5.0, GNU Emacs 27.1 is out.

The Fujitsu A64FX ARM processor that has 48 cores per node and 32GB of HBM2 memory that currently powers the fastest supercomputer is beginning to see GCC compiler support.

GNU C Library 2.32 (glibc 2.32) is now available as this important library for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.

The GNU Debugger (GDB) has merged initial support for debugging of eBPF code that is traditionally consumed by the Linux kernel as part of this in-kernel special purpose virtual machine.

While GCC with GNU Make and other build systems can scale nicely in compiling many files concurrently, there has been an ongoing GCC effort to be able to parallelize more of the GNU Compiler Collection work when compiling large source files.

The popular GNU Nano terminal text editor has reached version 5.0.

Making waves just over a year ago in the GNU Compiler Collection community was the "Ranger" project for on-demand range generator that's been worked on for several years at Red Hat. While their goals for GCC 10 didn't pan out, it's looking like in the next few months more of the Ranger infrastructure will land and thus putting it in the window for GCC 11.

Version 10.2 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is now available.