[ANNOUNCE] Linaro Binary Toolchain Release-Candidate GCC 4.9-2017.01-rc1

[Ryan Arnold]

The Linaro Binary Toolchain
============================

The Linaro GCC 4.9-2017.01-rc1 Release-Candidate is now available.

This is a courtesy toolchain. The Linaro GCC 4.9 toolchain is officially
out of maintenance. This release is being provided in order to merge in
the last FSF GCC 4.9 branch changes into the Linaro GCC 4.9 release.

Notice: All Linaro GCC 4.9 series toolchain users should migrate to the
latest version of the Linaro GCC 4 toolchain in order to mitigate
potential security exposure to CVE-2015-7547. See the NEWS section
below for details.

Download release-candidate packages from:

http://snapshots.linaro.org/components/toolchain/gcc-linaro/4.9-2017.01-rc1/
http://snapshots.linaro.org/components/toolchain/binaries/4.9-2017.01-rc1/

Previous snapshots and release-candidates are at:

http://snapshots.linaro.org/components/toolchain/binaries/

Previous releases are at:

http://releases.linaro.org/components/toolchain/binaries/

Host Requirements
==================

Linaro officially supports the current and previous Ubuntu LTS
releases (as of the time of this release). This does not mean that
the toolchain will not work on other/older Linux distributions. See
the following for the life-time of Ubuntu LTS releases.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

The host system upon which the cross-compiler will run requires a
minimum of glibc 2.14, because of API changes to glibc's memcpy API.

https://bugs.linaro.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1869

Package Versions
=================
Linaro GCC 4.9-2017.01-rc1

FSF eglibc 2.19 (linaro_eglibc-2_19)

Linaro newlib 2.1.0-2014.09 (linaro_newlib-branch)

Linaro binutils 2.24 (linaro_binutils-2_24-branch)

FSF GDB 7.10 (gdb-7.10-branch)


Linaro toolchain package git branches are hosted at:

https://git.linaro.org/toolchain

NEWS for GCC 4.9 (as of Linaro GCC 4.9-2017.01-rc1)
==================================================

* The soft-float targeted toolchains have switched to -mfloat-abi=soft
from -mfloat-abi=softfp.

This makes arm-linux-gnueabi and armeb-linux-gnueabi toolchains use
“soft” FP ABI instead of “softfp”.

Historically, TCWG’s toolchains provided both “soft” and “softfp”
multilibs, but when switching from crosstool-ng to cbuildv2/abe (which
support a single multilib) “softfp” multilib was choosen. Using
“-mfloat-abi=soft” is a better choice for a gnueabi toolchain, since
it doesn’t require cores to have a floating-point unit.

This change should not break compatibility for toolchain users since
the ABI will stay the same. The compiler and glibc libraries will not
refernce FP instructions.

* Removed .la files from binary installation as these files break
autotools builds.

https://bugs.linaro.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2764

* Host binaries for x86_64 linux hosts now have symbols and debug
information stripped in order to reduce the size of the toolchain
binary archives. This reduces the archive size from 830M to 480M for
aarch64-linux-gnu target with the gcc-4.9-branch.

* The armv8l-linux-gnueabihf targetted toolchain is now built using
--with-mode=thumb (like all of the other cross toolchains) rather than
the default which is ARM mode.

* Applied fix for CVE-2015-7545 - A stack-based buffer overflow in
glibc's getaddrinfo() was corrected in glibc 2.23 and backported into
Linaro eglibc 2.19 (linaro_eglibc-2_19).

https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2016-02/msg00416.html

* See the following Linaro GCC snapshot:

http://snapshots.linaro.org/components/toolchain/gcc-linaro/4.9-2015.10/


Contact Linaro
===============

File bugs at http://bugs.linaro.org

For Linaro member support see http://support.linaro.org

For Linaro community support email linaro-***@lists.linaro.org