GNU Coreutils 9.6 released today as the updated version of these core utilities common to Linux systems and elsewhere.
The GNU Coreutils 9.6 release brings a number of changes over its nearly year in development. Some of the Coreutils 9.6 highlights include various updates around the POSIX 2024 specification, support for macFUSE file-systems with the “mv” command, “cksum -a crc32b” is now a supported option, “ls –sort=name” is also now a supported option to explicitly select the default sorting by filename, sort operating more efficiently on pseudo files, and the stat and tail utilities now being aware of the Bcachefs and PIDFS file-system types. The wc utility also now uses a minimum of 256KiB at a time rather than 16KiB and that is yielding around 10% faster performance when reading cached files.
Also exciting on the performance side with GNU Coreutils 9.6 is “cksum -a crc” making use of AVX2 and AVX-512 on capable Intel/AMD processors as well as Armv8 SIMD extensions for modern AArch64 processors. Using AVX2 with “cksum -a crc” is yielding around a 40% speed-up or the AVX-512 code path yields around a 60% speed-up. The ARMv8 SIMD support for CRC meanwhile is 80% faster.
The full list of changes for GNU Coreutils 9.6 as well as many bug fixes can be found via the GNU.org release announcement.
