5.16. binutils
Updated binutils packages that fix two bugs and add two enhancements are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
The binutils packages contain a collection of binary utilities, including "ar" (for creating, modifying and extracting from archives), "as" (a family of GNU assemblers), "gprof" (for displaying call graph profile data), "ld" (the GNU linker), "nm" (for listing symbols from object files), "objcopy" (for copying and translating object files), "objdump" (for displaying information from object files), "ranlib" (for generating an index for the contents of an archive), "readelf" (for displaying detailed information about binary files), "size" (for listing the section sizes of an object or archive file), "strings" (for listing printable strings from files), "strip" (for discarding symbols), and "addr2line" (for converting addresses to file and line).
Bug Fixes
- BZ#676194
- Previously, the GNU linker could terminate unexpectedly with a segmentation fault when attempting to link together object files of different architectures (for example, an object file of 32-bit Intel P6 with an object file of Intel 64). This update modifies binutils so that the linker now generates an error message and refuses to link object files in the scenario described.
- BZ#809616
- When generating build-ID hashes, the GNU linker previously allocated memory for BSS sections. Consequently, the linker could use more memory than was necessary. This update modifies the linker to skip BSS sections and thus avoid unnecessary memory usage when generating build-ID hashes.
Enhancements
- BZ#739444
- With this update, backported patches have been included to support new AMD processors. Also, a duplicate entry for the bextr instruction has been removed from the disassembler's table.
- BZ#739144
- The GNU linker has been modified in order to improve performance of Table of Contents (TOC) addressability and Procedure Linkage Table (PLT) call stubs on the PowerPC and PowerPC 64 architectures.
All users of binutils are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which fix these bugs and add these enhancements.
