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xPack GNU Arm Embedded GCC v9.3.1-1.1 released

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

Version 9.3.1-1.1 is a new release of xPack GNU Arm Embedded GCC, following Arm release from June 01, 2020 (version 9-2020-q2-update). This is also the first release that adds support for running on Arm platforms, like Raspberry Pi.

This is the xPack distribution of the GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain.

There are separate binaries for Windows, macOS and GNU/Linux, 32/64-bit.

Starting with this version, support for 32/64-bit Arm GNU/Linux platforms, like Raspberry Pi, was added.

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@9.3.1-1.1.1 -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 9-2020-q2-update release June 01, 2020 and it is based on the gcc-arm-none-eabi-9-2020-q2-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/v7-r+fp.sp/softfp;@mthumb@march=armv7-r+fp.sp@mfloat-abi=softfp
thumb/v7-r+fp.sp/hard;@mthumb@march=armv7-r+fp.sp@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​

  • none

Changes​

There should be no functional changes.

Starting with 9.x, the new archives are created with a single folder named xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-9.3.1-1.1 instead of the hierarchical xPacks/arm-none-eabi-gcc/9.3.1-1.1. This internal folder name is used consistently on all platforms. The archive extension was changed to .tar.gz.

With these changes, the archives can now be used directly in other development environments (like Arduino), without having to repack them.

Python​

Support for Python scripting was added to GDB. This distribution provides two separate binaries, arm-none-eabi-gdb-py with Python 2.7 support, and arm-none-eabi-gdb-py3 with support for Python 3.7.

It is mandatory to have exactly those versions installed, otherwise GDB will not start properly.

For this it is recommended to install the binaries provided by Python, not those available in the distribution, since they may be incomplete, for example those in Ubuntu/Debian, which split the Python system library into multiple packages.

On GNU/Linux, the recommended way is to build is from sources, and install locally:

python3_version="3.7.9"
mkdir -p "${HOME}/Downloads"
curl -L --fail -o "${HOME}/Downloads/Python-${python3_version}.tgz" https://www.python.org/ftp/python/${python3_version}/Python-${python3_version}.tgz
rm -rf "${HOME}/Work/Python-${python3_version}"
mkdir -p "${HOME}/Work"
cd "${HOME}/Work"
tar xzf "${HOME}/Downloads/Python-${python3_version}.tgz"
cd "${HOME}/Work/Python-${python3_version}"
bash ./configure --prefix="${HOME}/opt"
make
make altinstall

To run GDB with this version of Python, use a script to set the proper environment, like:

mkdir -p "${HOME}/opt/bin"
cat <<'__EOF__' > "${HOME}/opt/bin/arm-none-eabi-gdb-py3.sh"
#!/usr/bin/env bash
PYTHONPATH="$($HOME/opt/bin/python3.7 -c 'import os; import sys; print(os.pathsep.join(sys.path))')" \
PYTHONHOME="$($HOME/opt/bin/python3.7 -c 'import sys; print(sys.prefix)')" \
arm-none-eabi-gdb-py3 "$@"
__EOF__
chmod +x "${HOME}/opt/bin/arm-none-eabi-gdb-py3.sh"

Text User Interface (TUI)​

Support for TUI was added to GDB. The ncurses library (v6.2) was added to the distribution.

note

TUI is not available on Windows

Known problems​

  • the GDB binaries with Python support were built with version 2.7/3.7, and require exactly those versions in order to run properly;
  • C++ exceptions in the non-nano libraries are not caught; fixed in 9.3.1-1.2.

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 9.3, running in an Ubuntu 12 Docker container
  • arm64/arm GNU/Linux: all binaries were built with GCC 9.3, running in an Ubuntu 16 Docker container
  • x86/x64 Windows: all binaries were built with mingw-w64 GCC 9.3, running in an Ubuntu 12 Docker container
  • x64 macOS: all binaries were built with GCC 9.3, running in a separate folder on macOS 10.10.5.

Build​

For the prerequisites and more details on the build procedure, please see the README-MAINTAINER page.

Travis tests​

The first set of tests were performed on Travis, by running a simple script to check if the binaries start and compile several simple programs on a wide range of platforms and distributions:

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:

6f5e5b94ecf2afece992b46a60465e3ed5aae172202c2a4e34f8e81e5b0da790
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-9.3.1-1.1-darwin-x64.tar.gz

8791f653f1fc15b004987a2b84a7c0aabd71bde11e0e68eb32846e9b1ad80986
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-9.3.1-1.1-linux-arm64.tar.gz

bb4e1f6c72e32a1696edcfdec57d32ece64ac691a0363e4781db559addac7b79
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-9.3.1-1.1-linux-arm.tar.gz

be98731e1bb05fd78e2ec5727f7d6c9a6f2ae548970bbd0998de7079021d8e11
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-9.3.1-1.1-linux-x32.tar.gz

10b859d83c7a451add58eaf79afdb9a4a66fc38920884e8a54c809e0a1f4ed3e
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-9.3.1-1.1-linux-x64.tar.gz

5cc86c9d17c4fda97107b374ae939fedf9d7428d06e6c31418ea0e5ff1e6aa41
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-9.3.1-1.1-win32-x32.zip

91ab5e1b9b3ffcc606262e2be96bd70ab0be26a42d21e610340412f65de2bb16
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-9.3.1-1.1-win32-x64.zip

Download analytics​

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