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xPack GNU Arm Embedded GCC v9.3.1-1.4 released

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

Version 9.3.1-1.4 is a maintenance release of xPack GNU Arm Embedded GCC; it adds an embedded Python 3 instance, to make arm-none-eabi-gdb-py3 standalone and run on any system.

The xPack GNU Arm Embedded GCC is the xPack distribution of the GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain.

There are separate binaries for Windows (x64 and x86), macOS (x64) and 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@9.3.1-1.4.1 -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

Changes​

Compared to the official Arm version, 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-9.3.1-1.4 instead of the hierarchical xPacks/arm-none-eabi-gcc/9.3.1-1.4. 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 a separate binary, arm-none-eabi-gdb-py3 with support for Python 3.7.

The Python 3 run-time is included, so GDB does not need any version of Python to be installed, and is insensitive to the presence of other versions.

Support for Python 2 was discontinued.

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

Bug fixes​

  • none

Enhancements​

  • none

Known problems​

  • GDB may issue the following warning, arm-none-eabi-gdb: warning: Couldn't determine a path for the index cache directory.; it is a known problem, caused when trying to create the cache folder ($HOME/.cache/gdb or $HOME/Library/Caches/gdb);

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:

fa0882dca6eb28818896fcc892efe015a2e3aac06a9c183bb443223ac2a1512b
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-9.3.1-1.4-darwin-x64.tar.gz

c75c5f0a2bd44cf5304762977d7057956ba5976be1cad73e7f218a55f6e06495
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-9.3.1-1.4-linux-arm64.tar.gz

58ec0ec72cff5d512381492c19ebb29472ee9fa77e03b33172f759c3e1aa1d6b
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-9.3.1-1.4-linux-arm.tar.gz

746c8674a54dd1676b1c188f1e32125bdb5e80f896560ebb3de3d0fffdd42718
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-9.3.1-1.4-linux-x32.tar.gz

720dd38a6abadc0286f2b3c8dbc7239c7dbfdd64bc052345d149657e5478b914
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-9.3.1-1.4-linux-x64.tar.gz

74ae2b0c63e4c1cb7c006669acb5f8d81e8339a66ba152c285881b0d39a582c7
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-9.3.1-1.4-win32-x32.zip

ed886282a17378996b84e553d40dd2029c76b428e4ce8bca45d15a098bc32125
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-9.3.1-1.4-win32-x64.zip

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