[ANNOUNCE] Linaro Binary Toolchain Release GCC 4.9-2017.01

[Ryan Arnold]

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

The Linaro GCC 4.9-2017.01 Release is now available.

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

Download release packages from:

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

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/

A description of what each ABI or triplet is can be found at:

https://collaborate.linaro.org/display/TCWGPUB/ARM+and+AArch64+Target+Triples

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

http://releases.linaro.org/components/toolchain/gcc-linaro/4.9-2017.01/

FSF eglibc 2.19 (linaro_eglibc-2_19)

http://www.eglibc.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/branches/eglibc-2_19/libc/NEWS?view=markup

Linaro newlib 2.1.0-2014.09 (linaro_newlib-branch)

https://sourceware.org/ml/newlib/2013/msg01128.html

Linaro binutils 2.24 (linaro_binutils-2_24-branch)

https://sourceware.org/git/gitweb.cgi?p=binutils-gdb.git;a=blob_plain;f=binutils/NEWS;hb=refs/tags/binutils-2_24

FSF GDB 7.10 (gdb-7.10-branch)

https://sourceware.org/ml/gdb-announce/2015/msg00005.html


Linaro toolchain package git branches are hosted at:

http://git.linaro.org/toolchain

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

* 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.

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

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

* The mingw toolchains are now archived using the rsync -L option in
order to avoid problems with Windows extractors and symbolic links.

https://review.linaro.org/#/c/16415/

This resolves the following user bugs:

https://bugs.linaro.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2684

https://bugs.linaro.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2192

https://bugs.linaro.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2762

* Copy the libwinpthread DLL into the bin directories so it gets into
the tmp directory before tar is run.

https://review.linaro.org/#/c/13723/

* Applied fix for CVE-2015-7547 - 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


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