The GNU C Library (Glibc) saw another batch of Year 2038 "Y2038" preparations on Tuesday for the Unix timestamp for when the time since 1 January 1970 can no longer be stored in a signed 32-bit integer.

The GCC compiler has long had a requirement that all contributors assign their copyright to the Free Software Foundation. Recently GCC dropped that copyright assignment policy and now the GNU C Library is looking at making a similar move.

Following this week's release of the big and long overdue GRUB 2.06 bootloader release, there is already development talk and action for the next release. Succeeding GRUB 2.0, GRUB 2.02, GRUB 2.04, and GRUB 2.06 is now going to be a bit of a version shakeup with GRUB 2.11 to be the next release.

It's shipping one year late but GRUB 2.06 is now officially available as the latest version of this widely-used open-source bootloader.

GNU Poke debuted earlier this year as a new GNU project providing an interactive editor and integrated, interactive programming language for dealing with binary data. Poke makes it easier to analyze binary data and their data structures as well as manipulating said binary data.

In addition to the GCC 9.4 release today, the GCC Steering Committee announced today that they are dropping their long-running policy of requiring copyright assignment to the Free Software Foundation for all code contributions.

While GCC 11 is the latest stable compiler series for the GNU Compiler Collection, for those still making use of GCC 9 that initially debuted in 2019 there is a new point release this week.

While the official/reference Rust compiler implementation is LLVM-based, there continues to be the independent effort working on a GCC Rust front-end as an alternative full implementation of the Rust programming language.

For those of you still relying on a GCC 8 compiler, it's time to upgrade beyond that considering GCC 11 debuted just several weeks back, but if you are on the 2018 era compiler for enterprise/legacy reasons, GCC 8.5 is out as one last hurrah.

GNU Guix as a cross-platform package manager based on Nix and also being the package management solution for the Linux-based GNU Guix system distribution is out with a new version.

With C2X and potentially a future version of C++, there is finally the #elifdef and #elifndef directives. The GNU Compiler Collection is preparing its support.

For a project as large and complex as the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) one would reasonably have assumed that it would have setup continuous integration / continuous delivery support years ago for helping to ensure the reliability of this widely-used open-source compiler and the GNU Toolchain at large. But that's actually only happening now in 2021.

GCC 11.1 is out today as the first stable release of the GNU Compiler Collection 11.

Freshly re-based against yesterday's Linux 5.12 kernel, GNU Linux-Libre 5.12-gnu is now available as the latest version of this GNU cleansed kernel now carrying a codename of "Freedo Misses Tasha".

GCC 11 is expected to be released next week following its recent release candidates.

The release candidate to GCC 11.1 as the first stable release of GCC 11 is now available for testing. If all goes well GCC 11.1.0 will officially debut next week while GCC 12 is now in development with their latest Git code.

Not to be confused with Assembly programming, the GNU Assembly is the new platform for a number of GNU toolchain projects like GCC, GNU C Library, GnuCOBOL, and other packages as a neutral home.

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.