Users of openSUSE Tumbleweed (the rolling-release version of the project) are in for a major update as the maintainers are now ready to shift to the latest iteration of the GCC compiler. As of the April 5 updates to Tumbleweed, the distribution uses the GCC 12's standard libraries and will very soon default to the GCC 12 compiler as well. This should come as no surprise, given that SUSE is one of the most active contributors to the GCC project.

Why is this important? GCC 12 brings several major improvements to the compiler including vectorization at the -O2 optimization level adds even more support for OpenMP 5.0 and 5.1, improves C++ and C2X language support and functionality, adds numerous improvements to the GCC JIT (Just In Time compiler), adds support for newer ARM CPU cores and the Intel AVX512-FP16 compiler, and introduces support for x86 SLS (Straight Line Speculation) mitigation.

The new GCC might also make use of Glibc 2.33's new HWCAPS ability, which is capable of loading optimized versions of libraries based on the CPU of a given system. This would make it possible for Linux to automatically load libraries that are better optimized for modern processors.

Download your copy of openSUSE Tumbleweed now.