GNU Binutils 2.47: New RISC-V Extensions and Linker Options

Hot on the heels of GNU C Library 2.44 comes the release of GNU Binutils 2.47 — an important set of binary utilities that ships widely on Linux systems and on other platforms using the GNU toolchain.

New Tool Options

The assembler gained the --reloc-section-sym=[all|internal|none] option, which controls whether relocations that reference symbols with local binding will be adjusted to use section symbols. In objdump and readelf, a --debug-dir=[DIR] option has appeared to specify where to look for separate files containing debug information. Additionally, objdump learned to display the location and type of global variables in object files when given the -map-global-vars flag.

The linker acquired the --start-lib and --end-lib options, as well as --no-link-mapless and --link-mapless for archives whose formats all lack a symbol index.

Faster Linking and Platform Changes

The BFD linker now supports a zero optimization level: when -O 0 is used, it stops merging the contents of mergeable sections. This noticeably speeds up the linking process at the cost of larger final binaries.

At the same time, Binutils 2.47 declares support for the 32-bit s390 platform deprecated, whereas 64-bit s390x is still maintained.

RISC-V Extensions

The release focuses primarily on the RISC-V architecture. Support has been added for a whole range of new standard version 1.0 extensions: zalasr, svrsw60t59b, zvabd, smpmpmt, along with the vector extension families zvqwdota8i, zvqwdota16i, zvfwdota16bf, zvfqwdota8f, zvqwbdota8i, zvqwbdota16i, zvfwbdota16bf, zvfqwbdota8f and zvfbdota32f. Separately, the SpacemiT extensions xsmtvdot and xsmtvdotii version 1.0 have been added.

Details and download links are available in the announcement on the mailing list.

Source: Phoronix