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xPack GNU Arm Embedded GCC v9.3.1-1.2 released

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

Version 9.3.1-1.2 is a maintenance release of xPack GNU Arm Embedded GCC, intended to fix C++ exceptions support for non-nano libraries, and to use DT_RPATH to make the binaries immune to custom LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

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

There are separate binaries for Windows 32/64-bit (x64 and x86), macOS (x64), GNU/Linux (x64 and x86, arm64 and arm).

Raspberry Pi

The main targets for the GNU/Linux Arm binaries are the Raspberry Pi class devices (armv7l and aarch64; armv6 is not supported).

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@9.3.1-1.2.1 -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 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​

  • [#7] Due to a bug in the build scripts, the non-nano libraries were also build without C++ exceptions support; fixed.

Enhancements​

The relative path in binaries was changed from DT_RUNPATH to DT_RPATH; this improves reliability, since the binaries can no longer be affected by custom LD_LIBRARY_PATH, as when using DT_RUNPATH.

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-9.3.1-1.2 instead of the hierarchical xPacks/arm-none-eabi-gcc/9.3.1-1.2. 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.

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 (added in mid-2020)
  • 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​

The scripts used to build this distribution are in:

  • distro-info/scripts

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:

622a4d54cef4c88f3a2ba2fc312a9490f5c406feb2ab16e3eda3cb053c12a1bf
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-9.3.1-1.2-darwin-x64.tar.gz

fb3258a52d09bae05f81e15c0fecde0d8930e14fda6b3dee89971b6a5c0d6f21
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-9.3.1-1.2-linux-arm64.tar.gz

34a977e63ae11b8854e35ed8698f2641a83536b455a3529d2801e1c538e1d6ae
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-9.3.1-1.2-linux-arm.tar.gz

f633d3017edc7d8aa0c21112dcc84bb3a5474a7a9c127134b036e1b6db544794
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-9.3.1-1.2-linux-x32.tar.gz

ada5b1e4d4fd6f6ffe80c398188eab5d2fc43639cb219fe212576f4bc2ebe35a
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-9.3.1-1.2-linux-x64.tar.gz

90d075bf405c5f427d674ad874680d8c31f4d1ea293bd8392b4dee04da411759
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-9.3.1-1.2-win32-x32.zip

ad9e7a9c0e64a7ebc38b431876dc4998f655a4385e56b7283a11ef1a5247567d
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-9.3.1-1.2-win32-x64.zip

Download analytics​

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