Following the recent release of Coreutils 9.10, the GNU Project has announced Binutils 2.46, an essential collection of low-level command-line tools used to build, examine, and manipulate object files, libraries, and executable binaries. Binutils remains a foundational part of the GNU toolchain, alongside GCC, glibc, and GDB.
One of the most significant updates in this release is broader processor support. Binutils 2.46 adds recognition for AMD Zen 6 processors, enhances RISC-V support with the new sdtrig v1.0 and ssstrict v1.0 extensions, and continues to improve compatibility across Arm architectures. Support for Arm v9.6 instructions is now complete, Arm v9.7 has been introduced via the -march=armv9.7-a option, and early support has been added for upcoming Arm features such as POE2 and vMTE.
The assembler now generates SFrame Version 3 by default, enabling support for binaries larger than 2 GiB, more flexible frame layouts, explicit identification of outermost frames, and improved handling of signal trampolines.
SFrame handling has also been refined. Undefined return addresses are now represented as frame row entries without offsets, and the updated libsframe library provides a dedicated API to detect this condition. Corresponding updates to objdump and readelf ensure accurate display of SFrame Version 3 data, including clear reporting of undefined return addresses.
This release introduces a new versioned shared library, libsframe.so.3, which adds symbol versioning under the LIBSFRAME_3.0 namespace.
In addition, Binutils 2.46 strengthens internal validation and plugin processing. Tools such as objcopy now apply stricter checks to target formats, helping surface incorrect usage that previously went unnoticed. The legacy behavior can still be used by explicitly specifying output target options.
As part of routine maintenance, support for several outdated or unused targets has been removed, including NaCl and Solaris on PowerPC. This cleanup reduces maintenance overhead and allows development to focus on actively supported platforms.
