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xPack GNU Arm Embedded GCC v8.3.1-1.3 released

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

Version 8.3.1-1.3 is a maintenance release of xPack GNU Arm Embedded GCC to partly fix the build for GDB with Python support.

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@8.3.1-1.3.1 -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

Bug fixes​

  • [#4] Due to a bug in the build scripts, the Windows gdb-py had a hard-wired dependency to Python 2.7.13 and failed to start on other versions; fixed;
  • [#3] Due to a bug in the build scripts, the macOS gdb-py had a wrong dependency and failed to start; fixed;
  • [#2] Due to a bug in the build scripts, the Windows binaries included two copies of the docs folder, one in root and one in the share folder; the script was fixed and now there is only one copy in share/docs.
  • [#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.

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​

  • [#5] the arm-none-eabi-gdb-py fails to start on Ubuntu (and possibly other Debian) systems, it fails with a message like:
$ PYTHONHOME=/usr PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/python2.7 arm-none-eabi-gdb-py --version
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site.py", line 554, in <module>
    main()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site.py", line 536, in main
    known_paths = addusersitepackages(known_paths)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site.py", line 272, in addusersitepackages
    user_site = getusersitepackages()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site.py", line 247, in getusersitepackages
    user_base = getuserbase() # this will also set USER_BASE
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site.py", line 237, in getuserbase
    USER_BASE = get_config_var('userbase')
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/sysconfig.py", line 587, in get_config_var
    return get_config_vars().get(name)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/sysconfig.py", line 533, in get_config_vars
    _init_posix(_CONFIG_VARS)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/sysconfig.py", line 417, in _init_posix
    from _sysconfigdata import build_time_vars
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/_sysconfigdata.py", line 6, in <module>
    from _sysconfigdata_nd import *
ImportError: No module named _sysconfigdata_nd

The problem is caused by gdb-py not being able to locate the Python system libraries, split into multiple packages and installed in multiple folders.

The workaround is to pass the Python environment to gdb-py:

PYTHONPATH="$(python -c 'import os; import sys; print(os.pathsep.join(sys.path))')" \
PYTHONHOME="$(python -c 'import sys; print(sys.prefix)')"

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:

f418c6d30ba7ad8cc5f8599a46b369dadf53e708574bf496e015780dd65f614d
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-8.3.1-1.3-darwin-x64.tgz

cf033653934df5b5cf26f8d23415e6593120a4a2bb23f9227f190e5648b668b3
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-8.3.1-1.3-linux-x32.tgz

b50cdb1cf8146aa441db68dd41fb6eb052ea2992fe94bcab54d27930e63b2af7
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-8.3.1-1.3-linux-x64.tgz

28caa9584ffb53a946551ac60b6fe1c35a2b356b2f9deb823448f2a94443ee3e
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-8.3.1-1.3-win32-x32.zip

fbc999128bfbf0daac36fbbc8d099db9688cb2aee89632b290ad8053d6997f97
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-8.3.1-1.3-win32-x64.zip

Download analytics​

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