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xPack GNU Arm Embedded GCC v8.3.1-1.2 released

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

Version 8.3.1-1.2 is a maintenance release of xPack GNU Arm Embedded GCC to fix the libgcov build bug.

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@8.3.1-1.2.1 -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.

libgcov​

[#1] Due to an omission in the build scripts, the content of the libgcov library was mostly empty; the script was fixed and now the library has the expected content.

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​

  • none

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:

f0192ac5ec9bb5ac0c2e8590c110b0265e81ee92f8912961827cccc693827d13
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-8.3.1-1.2-darwin-x64.tgz

d49ed1e2eb40c0ec73c7ea3f38216da0445d420bdfd25fef2bffaed3fe75d845
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-8.3.1-1.2-linux-x32.tgz

a5e76ad1b89a1cf0ef5be5be5e8de862452f388e041d59dede237c5b27a15c5b
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-8.3.1-1.2-linux-x64.tgz

d6eab345b254b331036856416da1591f4f8bd633a2718b72d93324468240aadf
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-8.3.1-1.2-win32-x32.zip

5d89caf249c7f048b6549bf1a6f88d2736aacfa5e23eaa16a03fd32ab87ffbdf
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-8.3.1-1.2-win32-x64.zip

Download analytics​

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