The Free Software Foundation has announced that the GNU C Library version 2.24 is now available for general availability. This is a free and open source, cross-platform GNU Project programming library.
The GNU C Library which is commonly known as glibc has been released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). The GNU C Library is designed as a portable and high-performance C library following the C11 standard.
Highlights of the GNU C Library
The GNU C Library now requires the minimum Linux kernel version to be version 3.2.x. However on i[4567]86 and x86_64, the Linux kernel version 2.6.32 or later is supported. The pap_AN locale which had been deprecated for years has now been deleted.
It is now recommended to use readdir and readdir64 over the previous readdir_r and readdir64_r functions which have now been deprecated.
The deprecated __malloc_initialize_hook as well as the long unused localedef –old-style option have been removed. variable has been removed too. The “union wait” type which was deprecated in the 1990s and is not part of POSIX has finally been removed. The int type should now be used.
There are also a number of security related changes such as the unnecessary stack copy in _nss_dns_getnetbyname_r and getaddrinfo which could cause a stack overflow has been removed.
The glob function has been fixed as it suffered from a stack-based buffer overflow. There is also a fix in the Sun RPC UDP client could exhaust all available stack space when flooded with crafted ICMP and UDP messages.
Over time, a denial of service due to memory exhaustion caused by the IPv6 nameserver management code in libresolv.
You can get the whole list of changes in the C library and see the list of contributors from the changelog page here. Meanwhile, you can download the source code from this page with the list of mirrors or clone the repository from the git repository
git clone git://sourceware.org/git/glibc.git
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