Last month the Mold 2.0 high-speed linker was released that shifted from AGPL to MIT licensing after their monetization strategy didn't pan out. This weekend the project is out with its Mold 2.1 release as another step forward for this alternative linker to GNU Gold and LLVM LLD.

Most notable with today's Mold 2.1 release is adding initial support for Loongson's LoongArch CPU architecture. Open-source projects continue adding support for LoongArch as this Chinese-developed, MIPS64-based and RISC-V inspired CPU architecture.

This LoongArch support was contributed by a Loongson engineer and is based on the LLVM LoongArch support and publicly available LoongArch documentation. Loongson is also going to provide a LoongArch system to the Mold project to help in testing/improving this CPU support.

The Mold 2.1 release also adds "-z nosectionheader" support to eliminate section headers from output files and there are also a number of ARM64 and RISC-V fixes.

Downloads and more details on Mold 2.1 via GitHub .