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GCC 8 and tools now in beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7

GCC 8 and tools now in beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7

mikeguerette
By Mike Guerette

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of Red Hat Developer Toolset 8 beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7.  The key new components for this release are:

  • GCC 8.2.1
  • GDB 8.2
  • Updated components such as SystemTap, Valgrind, OProfile, and many more

Like other tools, these are installable via yum from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 or 7 Devtools or RHSCL channel.  For more details, see the “New Features” section below.

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How to install Clang/LLVM 5 and GCC 7 on RHEL

How to install Clang/LLVM 5 and GCC 7 on RHEL

rctkv
By Rob Terzi

If you are developing with C/C++, Clang tools and newer versions of GCC can be quite helpful for checking your code and giving you better warnings and error messages to help avoid bugs. The newer compilers have better optimizations and code generation.

You can easily install the latest-supported Clang and GCC compilers for C, C++, Objective-C, and FORTRAN using yum on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  These compilers are available as software collections that are typically updated twice a year. The May 2018 update included Clang/LLVM 5 and GCC 7.3, as well as Go and Rust.

If you want your default gcc to always be GCC 7, or you want clang to always be in your path, this article shows how to permanently enable a software collection by adding it to the profile (dot files) for your user account. A number of common questions about software collections are also answered.

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Detecting String Truncation with GCC 8

Detecting String Truncation with GCC 8

msebor
By Martin Sebor

Continuing in the effort to detect common programming errors, the just-released GCC 8 contains a number of new warnings as well as enhancements to existing checkers to help find non-obvious bugs in C and C++ code. This article focuses on those that deal with inadvertent string truncation and discusses some of the approaches for avoiding the underlying problems. If you haven’t read it, you might also want to read David Malcolm’s article Usability improvements in GCC 8.

Why Is String Truncation a Problem?

It is well-known why buffer overflow is dangerous: writing past the end of an object can overwrite data in adjacent storage, resulting in data corruption. In the most benign cases, the corruption can simply lead to incorrect behavior of the program. If the adjacent data is an address in the executable text segment, the corruption may be exploitable to gain control of the affected process, which can lead to a security vulnerability. (See CWE-119 for more on buffer overflow.)

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GNU Toolchain Update – Spring 2018

GNU Toolchain Update – Spring 2018

nickclifton
By Nick Clifton

The GNU Toolchain is a collection of programming tools produced by the GNU Project. The tools are often packaged together due to their common use for developing software applications, operating systems, and low-level software for embedded systems.

This blog is part of a series (see: Fall 2017 Update) covering the latest changes and improvements in the components that make up this Toolchain. Apart from the announcement of new releases, the features described here are at the bleeding edge of software development in the tools. This means that it may be awhile before they make it into production releases, and they might not be fully functional yet. But anyone who is interested in experimenting with them can build their own copy of the Toolchain and then try them out.

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Recommended compiler and linker flags for GCC

Recommended compiler and linker flags for GCC

florianweimer
By Florian Weimer

Did you know that when you compile your C or C++ programs, GCC will not enable all exceptions by default?  Do you know which build flags you need to specify in order to obtain the same level of security hardening that GNU/Linux distributions use (such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora)? This article walks through a list of recommended build flags.

The GNU-based toolchain in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora (consisting of GCC programs such as gcc, g++, and Binutils programs such as as and ld)  are very close to upstream defaults in terms of build flags. For historical reasons, the GCC and Binutils upstream projects do not enable optimization or any security hardening by default. While some aspects of the default settings can be changed when building GCC and Binutils from source, the toolchain we supply in our RPM builds does not do this. We only align the architecture selection to the minimum architecture level required by the distribution.

Consequently, developers need to pay attention to build flags, and manage them according to the needs of their project for optimization, level of warning and error detection, and security hardening.

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The GDB Python API

pmuldoon
By Phil Muldoon

GDB has evolved in the last several years to provide a Python API. This series of articles will look at how a user can program GDB with the API and will also take an in-depth look at several features of that API. But, before we begin, a small history lesson is needed and a look at just why an API was needed.

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-Wimplicit-fallthrough in GCC 7

-Wimplicit-fallthrough in GCC 7

rhpolacek
By Marek Polacek

(See this article to install GCC 7 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.)

In C and C++, the cases of a switch statement are in fact labels, and the switch is essentially a go to that jumps to the desired label. Since labels do not change the flow of control, one case block falls through to the following case block, unless terminated by a return, a break, a no return call or similar. In the example below, “case 1” falls through to “case 2“:

switch (cond)
   {
   case 1:
     a = 1;
   case 2:
     a = 2;
     break;
   /* ... */
   }

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