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GNU MCU Eclipse ARM Embedded GCC v8.2.1-1.6 released

· 4 min read
Liviu Ionescu (ilg)
Liviu Ionescu (ilg)

Version 8.2.1-1.6 is a maintenance release of GNU MCU Eclipse ARM Embedded GCC that (finally) fixes the bugs affecting Windows LTO builds, present in the previous release.

Download​

The binary files are available from GitHub Releases.

Compliance​

This release follows the official GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain 8-2018-q4-major release from December 20, 2018 and it is based on the gcc-arm-none-eabi-8-2018-q4-major-src.tar.bz2 source invariant, which include GCC 8.2.1. GDB was built with the latest available sources (8.3.50).

Changes​

Compared to the ARM distribution, the build procedure is more or less the same and there should be no functional differences, except the following bug fixes:

  • [Issue:#4] the Windows paths with spaces bug apparently was caused by an old version of and with the new version (5.0.4) the 89249 gcc.c patch is no longer needed;
  • [Issue:#3] due to a problem in the GCC configure script and the specifics of the static build, LTO was not effective on Windows, and the initial workaround proved not effective either; in the new build environment the configure script is enables LTO and it is functional on windows too;
  • [Issue:#1] the liblto_plugin copied/linked to the lib/bdf-plugins for ar to find it and be able to process archives with LTO objects
  • a patch was applied to binutils to fix the 32-bit objcopy bug 24065
  • a patch was applied to gcc to fix the Windows LTO with -g bug 89183

Due to a large number of fixes needed, GDB was built with the latest Git commit bda678b9 from 2019-05-09, corresponding to GDB 8.3.50, to fix the bugs affecting C++ LTO projects 24145.

Python 3​

Experimental support was added for Python 3 in GDB. Unfortunately compiling GDB with mingw-w64 requires an update to the new Python 3 API, not yet available at the moment of this release.

Also support for 32-bit machines might not be fully functional.

Binaries​

Binaries for Windows, macOS and GNU/Linux are provided.

The GNU/Linux binaries were built on two CentOS 6 Docker images (32/64-bit), and run on any distribution based on CentOS 6 or later.

The macOS binary was built on a macOS 10.10.5 and must run on any newer macOS system.

The Windows binaries were built with mingw-w64, and run on any reasonably recent i686 and x86_64 Windows machines.

Instructions on how to install the binaries are available in the Install Guide.

The toolchain is also available as an xPack and can be conveniently installed with xpm:

xpm install --global @gnu-mcu-eclipse/arm-none-eabi-gcc@latest

This installs the latest available version.

For better control and repeatability, the build scripts use Docker containers; all files required during builds are available as a separate gnu-mcu-eclipse/arm-none-eabi-gcc-build project.

Tests​

The binaries were testes on Windows 10 Pro 32/64-bit, Ubuntu 18 LTS 64-bit, Xubuntu 18 LTS 32-bit and macOS 10.13.

The tests consist in building and debugging some simple Eclipse projects available in the build project.

Since the source code used for GCC is identical to the one used by ARM, the long and complex tests performed by ARM to validate their release were not executed again.

Known problems​

Although the current release is fully functional, due to a problem with the GCC make, the build created links with illegal names in the libexec folders. The current code used to unpack the archives does not complain, but future versions may include more thorough checks and fail. A new release to fix this issue will be available soon.

Checksums​

The SHA-256 hashes for the files are:

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