Glibc 2.10 Brings Numerous Enhancements

Red Hat developer Ulrich Drepper wanted to offer more information about the new glibc functionality than would normally be found in the release notes, so he did so on his website. He is a member of the so-called "Austin" working group, part of the Open Group that is developing open standards for the UNIX platform.

Drepper reported that work on the 2008 revision of the Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is now finished and was largely integrated into glibc 2.10. New is compliance with C++, with the result that "some incorrect C++ programs, which worked before, will now fail to compile." He went further into detail about DNS NSS improvements and promised faster response times, suggesting that since Network Security Services is already certified, to use it in implementing crypt(3) in libcrypt. Drepper: "Combine this with the new password hashing I’ve developed almost two years ago and we have now fully certified password handling."

The Fedora developer wasn't too happy with printf hooks: "Certain special interest groups subverted the standardization process (again) and pressed through changes." The next glibc version, therefore, won't include printf support, although his website has some helpful workarounds. New glibc functionality also includes improvements to malloc scalability and the new malloc-info function to export via XML.

The current glibc 2.9 version is available on the GNU project page, with the 2.10 version soon to follow.