Nick Clifton with Red Hat announced today the release of GNU Binutils 2.42, the newest feature release to this collection of binary utilities widely relied upon by Linux and Unix-like systems as part of the compiler toolchain.

GNU Binutils 2.42 brings support for new CPU extensions across multiple architectures, various new warnings, and other new options. Some of the GNU Binutils 2.42 highlights include:

- Support for Intel Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) relocations in LD.

- Support for more Intel architecture extensions. This includes initial Gas support for Intel APX with 32 GPRs, NDD, PUSH2/POP2, PUSHP/POPP and more. There is also support for Intel USER_MSR, AVX-VNNI-INT16, SHA512, SM3, SM4, PBNDKB, and AVX10.1 instructions with the GNU Assembler (Gas). Great as always seeing Intel's timely contributions to open-source toolchain components ahead of next-gen processor launches with these instructions supported.

- Support for the KVX instruction set.

- Support for more AArch64 and RISC-V architecture extensions.

- Support for the LoongArch ABI v2.30 is now implemented.

- The readelf program has a new "--extra-sym-info" for displaying additional information around symbols.

- A new warning option "--warn-execstack-objects" to warn about executable stacks just when an input object file requests one. The "--enable-error-execstack=" option is also added to allow setting the default for converting executable stack warnings to errors.

More details on the GNU Binutils 2.42 changes via the release announcement .