RHEA-2015:2045 - Product Enhancement Advisory

Topic

New devtoolset-4-binutils packages are now available as a part of Red Hat
Developer Toolset 4.0 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Description

Binutils is 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). The devtoolset-4-binutils packages provide the Red Hat Developer
Toolset version of binutils.

This enhancement update adds the devtoolset-4-binutils packages to Red Hat
Developer Toolset 4.0 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. These packages include
binutils 2.25, which is the latest stable version of binutils. It provides a
number of bug fixes and enhancements over the version included in Red Hat
Developer Toolset 3.1.

Features in the GNU Linker

• Binaries in the COFF/PE format now once again contain real timestamps by

default. This was done so that the binaries will be compatible with tools from
other vendors. However, including timestamps in binaries means that two
identical builds made at different times will not compare as identical. The
timestamps can be disabled using a command-line option, "--no-insert-timestamp".

• Binaries in the COFF/PE format can now have a build-id added to them using the

"--build-id" command line option. This behaves in the same way as the
"--build-id" option does for binaries in the ELF format.

• Support has been added for the AVR Tiny microcontrollers and the Andes NDS32

architecture.

• Support for the Openrisc and OR32 architectures has been replaced with support

for the OR1K architecture.

Features in the GNU Assembler

• The ARM assembler now accepts output from the CodeComposer Studio tool. This

is enabled using a new command line option, "-mccs".

• Support has been added for the AVR Tiny microcontrollers and the Andes NDS32

architecture.

• Support for the Openrisc and OR32 architectures has been replaced with support

for the OR1K architecture.

For information on features introduced in other binary tools, see Appendix A.3.
Changes in binutils in the Red Hat Developer Toolset 4.0 User Guide linked from
the References section.

(BZ#1224751)

This update also fixes the following bugs:

• Previously, under certain circumstances, printing out information from an

Executable Linking Format (ELF) file by using the eu-readelf utility failed with
an error message "invalid CIE reference in FDE". This bug has been fixed, and
eu-readelf now prints from ELF files as expected. (BZ#1051209)

• The two linkers, gold and ld, have different ways of handling hidden symbols,

which leads to incompatibilities in their behavior. Previously, the gold and ld
linkers had inconsistent and incorrect behavior with regard to shared libraries
and hidden symbols. There were two scenarios:

• If a shared library referenced a symbol that existed elsewhere in both hidden

and non-hidden versions, the gold linker produced a bogus warning message about
the hidden version.

• If a shared library referenced a symbol that only existed elsewhere as a

hidden symbol, the gold linker created an executable, even though it could not
work.
The gold linker has been updated so that it no longer issues bogus warning
messages about hidden symbols that also exist in a non-hidden version. The
second scenario cannot be solved in the linker. It is up to the programmer to
ensure that a non-hidden version of the symbol is available when the application
is run. (BZ#895241, BZ#1218300)

All users who require devtoolset-4-binutils are advised to install these new
packages.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously released errata
relevant to your system have been applied.

For details on how to apply this update, refer to:

https://access.redhat.com/articles/11258

Affected Products

• Red Hat Software Collections (for RHEL Server) 1 for RHEL 7.7 x86_64
• Red Hat Software Collections (for RHEL Server) 1 for RHEL 7.6 x86_64
• Red Hat Software Collections (for RHEL Server) 1 for RHEL 7.5 x86_64
• Red Hat Software Collections (for RHEL Server) 1 for RHEL 7.4 x86_64
• Red Hat Software Collections (for RHEL Server) 1 for RHEL 7.3 x86_64
• Red Hat Software Collections (for RHEL Server) 1 for RHEL 7.2 x86_64
• Red Hat Software Collections (for RHEL Server) 1 for RHEL 7.1 x86_64
• Red Hat Software Collections (for RHEL Server) 1 for RHEL 7 x86_64
• Red Hat Software Collections (for RHEL Server) 1 for RHEL 6.7 x86_64
• Red Hat Software Collections (for RHEL Server) 1 for RHEL 6.6 x86_64
• Red Hat Software Collections (for RHEL Server) 1 for RHEL 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Software Collections (for RHEL Workstation) 1 for RHEL 7 x86_64
• Red Hat Software Collections (for RHEL Workstation) 1 for RHEL 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Software Collections (for RHEL Server) from RHUI 1 for RHEL 7 x86_64
• Red Hat Software Collections (for RHEL Server) from RHUI 1 for RHEL 6 x86_64

Fixes

CVEs

(none)

References

• https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Developer_Toolset/4/html/User_Guide/sect-Changes_in_Version_4.0-binutils.html