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xPack GNU Arm Embedded GCC v10.2.1-1.1 released

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

Version 10.2.1-1.1 is a new release of xPack GNU Arm Embedded GCC, following Arm release from Dec 11, 2020 (version 10-2020-q4-major).

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.

note

For consistency with the Node.js naming conventions, the names of the Intel 32-bit images are now suffixed with -ia32.

Install​

The easiest way to install this specific version, is by using xpm:

xpm install @xpack-dev-tools/arm-none-eabi-gcc@10.2.1-1.1.2 -verbose

The full details of installing the xPack GNU Arm Embedded GCC on various platforms can be found in the Install Guide.

Compliance​

  • GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain release 10-2020-q4-major from December 11, 2020 and uses the gcc-arm-none-eabi-10-2020-q4-major-src.tar.bz2 source invariant. It includes:
    • GCC 10.2.1
    • binutils 2.35
    • newlib 3.3.0
    • GDB 10.1

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
thumb/v8.1-m.main+mve/hard;@mthumb@march=armv8.1-m.main+mve@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-10.2.1-1.1 instead of the hierarchical xPacks/arm-none-eabi-gcc/10.2.1-1.1. 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 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​

  • 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 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:

061615d3e35d026cfa3ef8999f2bdaef2181b56e61029f58c8e0f1054bba046b
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-10.2.1-1.1-darwin-x64.tar.gz

88b4f581a14b0dc2ee2313f4342f38996a4c8f3e4d09d9f70a6c4a4b9ea360e7
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-10.2.1-1.1-linux-arm64.tar.gz

b726faccb8a3c426012592145d9d49a9b998a950613a4848bf8d899a8929ae34
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-10.2.1-1.1-linux-arm.tar.gz

8adaca8af367a54d1acd2b274cfdc18384b87fbe0ba613322ea3ead20677a132
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-10.2.1-1.1-linux-ia32.tar.gz

840e90b527d30143b8d8e5eb894218858ed14226bdc8664686f0848592b6e474
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-10.2.1-1.1-linux-x64.tar.gz

5b4576c8280a6788bd1abe54c8172e03f9947ddd776960d2043b33955389e739
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-10.2.1-1.1-win32-ia32.zip

adfd5e940f3cb27589e7ea06d41291559fe37d74a475922eb80b7d34e1810968
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-10.2.1-1.1-win32-x64.zip

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