GNU Binutils 2.47 Released With New Linker, Disassembler Options

The new release also adds reproducible tarballs and new tools, while dropping Gold from the main tarball.

The chief maintainer for Gnu Binutils, Nick Clifton, just announced the release of Gnu Binutils 2.47 on the gnu-info@gnu.org mailing list. The release tarballs were built reproducibly, making the source archives easier to verify independently.

Gnu Binutils is a set of command-line tools for working with compiled code, object files, libraries, and executables, especially for tasks like assembling, linking, inspecting, and modifying binaries. Developers use it as part of their build and debugging toolchain, often alongside GCC (Gnu’s compiler) and GDB (the Gnu Debugger, for inspecting and debugging programs while they run), because it helps them turn source code into runnable programs and analyze what those programs contain.

This release omits the deprecated gold linker from the main source tarball as part of Binutils’ ongoing cleanup of older packaging. Users who need it should use the separate binutils-with-gold tarball for now. Also deprecated is support for the 32-bit s390 target, although support for the 64-bit s390x target still works.

This new release comes with plenty of new features:

• A new assembler command line option: --reloc-section-sym=[all|internal|none] controls whether relocations referencing local binding symbols are adjusted to use section symbols.
• The AArch64 disassembler now accepts a command line option of -M annotate which displays the symbol associated with undefined instructions, should there be one.
• Similarly, the x86 and x86-64 disassemblers now accept a command line option of -M annotate-immediates which displays the symbol associated with immediate values, should there be one.
• Objdump and readelf have a new --debug-dir=<DIR> option which can be used to tell them where to find separate debug info files.
• Objdump now has a --map-global-vars option which displays the location and type of global variables in object files.
• The bfd linker now has an optimization level of zero. Using -O 0 on the linker command line will stop it from combining the contents of mergeable sections. This can significantly speed up the link process at the cost of producing larger binaries.
• The linker now supports --start-lib/--end-lib options and the LIB linker script statement for treating a list of object files as members of an artificial archive.
• Linker support has also been added for archives with no symbol index in all formats, not only XCOFF. It is on by default and controlled with the --no-link-mapless and --link-mapless options, also for XCOFF.

In addition, support has been added for more than 15 standard RISC-V extensions. Sources are available to be downloaded on the Gnu website and on Sourceware.

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Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

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