On 6/24/07, Jan de Groot wrote:

Hi all,

Andy and I uploaded a new toolchain to testing. This includes a new binutils, a new gcc and a new glibc. On AMD64, the old stable 2.17 binutils doesn't function correctly in all cases with gcc 4.2 and glibc 2.6 (I was waiting for a binutils 2.18 release, but it's not coming within the next month I'm afraid).

One big new feature in the new binutils is the support for GNU hashing, which is, according to Redhat, 50% faster in symbol lookups when doing dynamic linking. The GNU hashing is incompatible with the older hashing. There's a way inbetween: supporting both hash styles. The gcc in testing enforces both hash styles in the resulting linked binary. This means the size increases (I've seen libstdc++.so.6 and libc.so.6 getting increased by 10-20KB on a 1-2MB sized binary), but we maintain compatibility with other distributions and with our current "old style" glibc whenever something gets built with this toolchain. this is also the road taken by Debian. As long as binutils 2.17.50.xx isn't a so called stable release, we will keep this duplicate hashing style around, we have to decide what to do after the 2.18 release of binutils.

(gcc-fortran will follow later tomorrow btw).

Have fun testing this new toolchain, please report any bugs you find in flyspray.

No problems here, looks pretty good to me. -Dan