binutils-2.44.0

[Xi Ruoyao]

Create the ticket early to note:

The hard coded line number in the sed for pass 2 needs to be changed to 6031 from 6009.

[Xi Ruoyao]

Now it seems "only" 10 (instead of 12 in the book) gold tests are failing.

[Bruce Dubbs]

This is interesting: ​https://sourceware.org/pipermail/binutils/2025-January/138617.html

Especially the line: "Long term however we are planning to deprecate gold."

[Xi Ruoyao]

Replying to Bruce Dubbs:

This is interesting: ​https://sourceware.org/pipermail/binutils/2025-January/138617.html

Especially the line: "Long term however we are planning to deprecate gold."

I'm in favor of just building the "binutils without gold" tarball if the ​separation happens. Today if a package really peruses "being linked with a modern linker," it uses lld or mold instead of gold.

[Xi Ruoyao]

I'm using --disable-gold for the new system to see if there would be any impact from the removal.

[Xi Ruoyao]

100+ LLVM tests fail w/o gold because they have -fuse-ld=gold. After using a sed to remove -fuse-ld=gold 23 of them still fails with something like "cannot resolve R_X86_64_8 against hidden symbol for PIE." Perhaps just some linker behavior differences.

[Xi Ruoyao]

Now 2.44.0.

We are pleased to announce that version 2.44 of the GNU Binutils project sources have been released and are now available for download at:

• ​https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/binutils
• ​https://sourceware.org/pub/binutils/releases/

In a change to our previous practice, in this release the binutils-2.44.tar tarball does not contain the sources for the gold linker. This is because the gold linker is now deprecated and will eventually be removed unless volunteers step forward and offer to continue development and maintenance.

The gold sources can be found in the binutils-with-gold-2.44.tar tarballs. Going forward, odd numbered releases of the binutils (2.45, 2.47, etc) will just have the binutils.2.xx.tar tarballs, whilst even numbered releases will have both the binutils-2.xx.tar and the binutils-with-gold-2.xx.tar tarballs. Eventually this will stop and gold will be dropped altogether.

Checksums for the release tarballs:

f66390a661faa117d00fab2e79cf2dc9d097b42cc296bf3f8677d1e7b452dc3a  binutils-2.44.tar.bz2
0cdd76777a0dfd3dd3a63f215f030208ddb91c2361d2bcc02acec0f1c16b6a2e  binutils-2.44.tar.gz
250e11049b129c6b2d53f93f7500c2a4d6818f17c3fc611d9a3226e60e43958c  binutils-2.44.tar.lz
ce2017e059d63e67ddb9240e9d4ec49c2893605035cd60e92ad53177f4377237  binutils-2.44.tar.xz
79cb120b39a195ad588cd354aed886249bfab36c808e746b30208d15271cc95c  binutils-2.44.tar.zst
34733ea495cc0e50e70db4e5890dec28ac41f0e14c4a165e69cf27fb99a8c4c8  binutils-with-gold-2.44.tar.bz2
d47b08458df45ec2da3ff116e80c72d2fcb7eb582039464608f00e63ff403d36  binutils-with-gold-2.44.tar.gz
d6f36423d29bc301da6a4f60eea0947c908d6786457dd49c5fcc1a9263a41b20  binutils-with-gold-2.44.tar.lz
67be9198476cc37436e2801de649f4ad80bf0d02430d86aff63c6b59b6e23987  binutils-with-gold-2.44.tar.xz
85696cb6fb8cb3e82330068737f76786462a85801fbec94e64e142436c281735  binutils-with-gold-2.44.tar.zst

These tarballs were made with the "-r <date>" option supported by the src-release.sh script. This attempts to make reproducible tarballs by sorting the files and passing the "--mtime=<date>" option to tar. The date used for these tarballs was obtained by running:

     git log -1 --format=%cd --date=format:%F bfd/version.m4

This release contains numerous bug fixes, and also the following new features:

Assembler:

Support for new architecture extensions for AArch64, Risc-V and x86.

Linker:

The default maximum page size was changed from 16KiB to 64KiB for LoongArch.

This now supports mixed LTO and non-LTO object files in relocatable output.

The ELF forms of the linker support a --image-base=<ADDR> option for compatibility with LLD.

The --build-id= option now accepts an argument of "xx" which enables the use of the xxhash library. This produces a 128-bit hash and is 2-4x faster than md5 or sha1.

The ELF linker option --package-metadata supports percent-encoded and %[string] encoded JSON payloads.

Disassembler:

The RISC-V disassembler now supports -M,max option like QEMU to dump instruction without checking architecture support as usual.

GprofNG:

Support added for hardware event counters for Neoverse-N1, Ampere-1, and Appliedmicro processors.

Support for the Nios II target has been removed.

For more information please see:

• ​https://sourceware.org/git/gitweb.cgi?p=binutils-gdb.git;a=blob_plain;f=gas/NEWS;;hb=refs/tags/binutils-2_44
• ​https://sourceware.org/git/gitweb.cgi?p=binutils-gdb.git;a=blob_plain;f=ld/NEWS;hb=refs/tags/binutils-2_44
• ​https://sourceware.org/git/gitweb.cgi?p=binutils-gdb.git;a=blob_plain;f=binutils/NEWS;hb=refs/tags/binutils-2_44

[Bruce Dubbs]

Fixed at commit 4f401fb372.