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xPack GNU Arm Embedded GCC v8.3.1-1.1 released

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

Version 8.3.1-1.1 is a new release of xPack GNU Arm Embedded GCC, following Arm release from July 10, 2019 (version 8-2019-q3-update).

Download​

The binary files are available from GitHub Releases.

Install​

The easiest way to install this specific version, is by using xpm:

xpm install @xpack-dev-tools/arm-none-eabi-gcc@8.3.1-1.1.1 -verbose

The full details of installing the xPack GNU Arm Embedded GCC on various platforms can be found in the Install Guide.

Compliance​

This release follows the official GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain 8-2019-q3-update release from July 10, 2019 and it is based on the gcc-arm-none-eabi-8-2019-q3-update-src.tar.bz2 source invariant.

For more details see the original Arm release text files:

  • distro-info/arm-readme.txt
  • distro-info/arm-release.txt

Supported libraries​

The supported libraries are:

$ arm-none-eabi-gcc -print-multi-lib
.;
arm/v5te/softfp;@marm@march=armv5te+fp@mfloat-abi=softfp
arm/v5te/hard;@marm@march=armv5te+fp@mfloat-abi=hard
thumb/nofp;@mthumb@mfloat-abi=soft
thumb/v7/nofp;@mthumb@march=armv7@mfloat-abi=soft
thumb/v7+fp/softfp;@mthumb@march=armv7+fp@mfloat-abi=softfp
thumb/v7+fp/hard;@mthumb@march=armv7+fp@mfloat-abi=hard
thumb/v6-m/nofp;@mthumb@march=armv6s-m@mfloat-abi=soft
thumb/v7-m/nofp;@mthumb@march=armv7-m@mfloat-abi=soft
thumb/v7e-m/nofp;@mthumb@march=armv7e-m@mfloat-abi=soft
thumb/v7e-m+fp/softfp;@mthumb@march=armv7e-m+fp@mfloat-abi=softfp
thumb/v7e-m+fp/hard;@mthumb@march=armv7e-m+fp@mfloat-abi=hard
thumb/v7e-m+dp/softfp;@mthumb@march=armv7e-m+fp.dp@mfloat-abi=softfp
thumb/v7e-m+dp/hard;@mthumb@march=armv7e-m+fp.dp@mfloat-abi=hard
thumb/v8-m.base/nofp;@mthumb@march=armv8-m.base@mfloat-abi=soft
thumb/v8-m.main/nofp;@mthumb@march=armv8-m.main@mfloat-abi=soft
thumb/v8-m.main+fp/softfp;@mthumb@march=armv8-m.main+fp@mfloat-abi=softfp
thumb/v8-m.main+fp/hard;@mthumb@march=armv8-m.main+fp@mfloat-abi=hard
thumb/v8-m.main+dp/softfp;@mthumb@march=armv8-m.main+fp.dp@mfloat-abi=softfp
thumb/v8-m.main+dp/hard;@mthumb@march=armv8-m.main+fp.dp@mfloat-abi=hard

Changes​

There should be no functional changes.

lib/bdf-plugins​

To improve LTO support, the lib/bdf-plugins folder was added, with a link to the liblto_plugin.so library (a file copy on Windows).

This allows the use of traditional program names, like arm-none-eabi-ar instead of the new arm-none-eabi-gcc-ar, without getting errors like:

arm-none-eabi-ar -r  "libarm-static-lib.a"  ./lib.o
arm-none-eabi-ar: creating libarm-static-lib.a
arm-none-eabi-ar: ./lib.o: plugin needed to handle lto object <---

The issue was reported to Arm as bug 1838049.

Python 3​

Partial experimental support for Python 3 was added to GDB for GNU/Linux and macOS; not yet available on Windows (24469).

Known problems​

  • [#1] Due to an omission in the build scripts, the content of the libgcov library is mostly empty; the problem was fixed starting with v8.3.1-1.2.

Documentation​

The original PDF documentation is available in the share/doc folder.

Supported platforms​

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

The binaries were built using the xPack Build Box (XBB), a set of build environments based on slightly older distributions, that should be compatible with most recent systems.

  • x86/x64 GNU/Linux: all binaries were built with GCC 7.4, running in a CentOS 6 Docker container
  • x86/x64 Windows: all binaries were built with mingw-w64 GCC 7.4, running in a CentOS 6 Docker container
  • x64 macOS: most binaries were built with GCC 7.4, running in a separate folder on macOS 10.10.5; GDB cannot be compiled with GCC, so Apple clang was used.

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 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.

Checksums​

The SHA-256 hashes for the files are:

61cdc9d05d6a666b2df45ad2dcd5aa5d7eccf1ffb865420c35704a1917812eb2
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-8.3.1-1.1-darwin-x64.tgz

266f5ebde79ce4d5a91232af22707dad076fdcf35031042b498fae1ae09989d7
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-8.3.1-1.1-linux-x32.tgz

2e49bdb076ed96cdde2b8320d9496875eccd7eb83d2af0dc378e02dd17aedec4
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-8.3.1-1.1-linux-x64.tgz

3854e4683d3977f27573610cf6badd0f0433ddc37ed0d922757cf1ff708be405
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-8.3.1-1.1-win32-x32.zip

39e1e553edcae83856882b8587a7f8b6d5c9f8fc11f10247b0e2af3321481fdb
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-8.3.1-1.1-win32-x64.zip

Download analytics​

Credit to Shields IO for the badges and to Somsubhra/github-release-stats for the individual file counters.