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7.15. binutils

Updated binutils packages that fix two bugs are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
The binutils packages provide a set 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#773526
In order to display a non-printing character, the readelf utility adds the "0x40" string to the character. However, readelf previously did not add that string when processing multibyte characters, so that multibyte characters in the ELF headers were displayed incorrectly. With this update, the underlying code has been corrected and readelf now displays multibyte and non-ASCII characters correctly.
BZ#825736
Under certain circumstances, the linker could fail to produce the GNU_RELRO segment when building an executable requiring GNU_RELRO. As a consequence, such an executable failed upon start-up. This problem affected also the libudev library so that the udev utility did not work. With this update, the linker has been modified so that the GNU_RELRO segment is now correctly created when it is needed, and utilities such as udev now work correctly.
All users of binutils are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which fix these bugs.