The GNU MP Bignum Library

NEWS 2023-06-21: The GMP servers has been under serious load due to a barrage of clone requests from Microsoft/Github. Github's setup encourages "forks" of their projects, and such forks then by default pull in parent project changes. Around 2023-06-15, a project known as FFmpeg decided that it would be a great idea to clone GMP in their CI scripts, meaning that every one of their commits requested a compressed clone from the GMP servers. But, by Github's design, hundreds of FFmpeg forks automatically followed suit, themselves cloning the GMP repo.

In effect, Microsoft's computer cloud performed a DDoS attack on the GMP servers.

After bringing up the issue here and on the GMP mailing lists, some Github brass replied, minimizing the issue and blaming our servers for the denial-of-service attack. They did not do anything to stop the attack! In fact, it is still ongoing a week later. Each clone takes about 10 CPU seconds on our server, each FFmpeg commit resulted in about 10 CPU hours of CPU on our side.

Our servers are fully available again, but that's the result of us adding all participating Microsoft network ranges to our firewall. We understand that we are far from the first project to take such measures against Github.

Thanks to a very generous donation from Christian Calderon, the GMP project now has a brand new, AMD Epyc server which will replace the old server. This is great for GMP, not only because of the old server's hardware security issues, but also since the new server is 3x more powerful than the old one.

Here are the specs of the system Christian has given us:

GMP is a free library for arbitrary precision arithmetic, operating on signed integers, rational numbers, and floating-point numbers. There is no practical limit to the precision except the ones implied by the available memory in the machine GMP runs on. GMP has a rich set of functions, and the functions have a regular interface.

The main target applications for GMP are cryptography applications and research, Internet security applications, algebra systems, computational algebra research, etc.

GMP is carefully designed to be as fast as possible, both for small operands and for huge operands. The speed is achieved by using fullwords as the basic arithmetic type, by using fast algorithms, with highly optimised assembly code for the most common inner loops for a lot of CPUs, and by a general emphasis on speed.

The first GMP release was made in 1991. It is continually developed and maintained, with a new release about once a year.

Since version 6, GMP is distributed under the dual licenses, GNU LGPL v3 and GNU GPL v2. These licenses make the library free to use, share, and improve, and allow you to pass on the result. The GNU licenses give freedoms, but also set firm restrictions on the use with non-free programs.

GMP is part of the GNU project. For more information about the GNU project, please see the official GNU web site.

GMP's main target platforms are Unix-type systems, such as GNU/Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, Mac OS X/Darwin, BSD, AIX, etc. It also is known to work on Windows in both 32-bit and 64-bit mode.

GMP is brought to you by a team listed in the manual.

GMP is carefully developed and maintained, both technically and legally. We of course inspect and test contributed code carefully, but equally importantly we make sure we have the legal right to distribute the contributions, meaning users can safely use GMP. To achieve this, we will ask contributors to sign paperwork where they allow us to distribute their work.

There are several categories of functions in GMP:

To try to verify that the file you have downloaded has not been tampered with, you can check that the GnuPG signature matches the contents of the file. Use your GnuPG software or a key server directly to get the key that was used for creating the signature. Starting from the repackaging of gmp-5.1.0 as gmp-5.1.0a.tar.* the following key is used to sign GMP releases:

Instead of using a release, you may also get the latest code from the GMP repositories. This will require some more work compared to using a release.

Please first see the manual on how to report bugs. The proper address for bug reports is gmp-bugs at gmplib.org.

Most problems with GMP these days are due to problems not in GMP, but with the compiler used for compiling the GMP sources. This is a major concern to the GMP project, since an incorrect computation is an incorrect computation, whether caused by a GMP bug or a compiler bug. We fight this by making the GMP testsuite have great coverage, so that it should catch every possible miscompilation.

Starting in early 2024, we cannot deliver email to any gmail.com addresses. This is a result of that Google no longer trusts our email server. We have never delivered spam to any gmail account, their policies are based on other considerations.

Note that we perform spam and virus filtering of these lists. The lists have been 100% spam-free during the last years.

We're blocking all mail from many IP ranges, for spam mitigation. That even includes geo blocking. If you are affected but have a legitimate reason to send mail to the GMP project, e.g., if you work at a university or corporation with an interest in GMP, please let us know; we will open access for you.

The current stable release is 6.3.0, released 2023-07-30.

For patches to older GMP versions, please see the Info on older GMP releases.

Please see the GMPng page for information on what we're working on.