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xPack GNU Arm Embedded GCC v10.3.1-2.2 released

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

Version 10.3.1-2.2 is a maintenance release; it slightly reduces the size of the archives.

The xPack GNU Arm Embedded GCC is a standalone cross-platform binary distribution of 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.

Prerequisites​

  • x86/x64 GNU/Linux: any system with GLIBC 2.15 or higher (like Ubuntu 12 or later, Debian 8 or later, RedHat/CentOS 7 later, Fedora 20 or later, etc)
  • arm64/arm GNU/Linux: any system with GLIBC 2.23 or higher (like Ubuntu 16 or later, Debian 9 or later, RedHat/CentOS 8 or later, Fedora 24 or later, etc)
  • x86/x64 Windows: Windows 7 with the Universal C Runtime (UCRT), Windows 8, Windows 10
  • x64 macOS: 10.13 or later

Install​

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

xpm install @xpack-dev-tools/arm-none-eabi-gcc@10.3.1-2.2.1 --verbose

Comprehensive instructions for installing xPack GNU Arm Embedded GCC on different platforms can be found in the Install Guide.

Compliance​

The xPack GNU Arm Embedded GCC generally follows the official Arm Embedded GCC releases.

The current version is based on:

  • GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain release 10.3-2021.10 from October 21, 2021 and uses the gcc-arm-none-eabi-10.3-2021.10-src.tar.bz2 source invariant. It includes:
    • GCC 10.3.1
    • binutils 2.36
    • newlib 4.1.0
    • GDB 10.2

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.

Compared to 10.3.1-2.2, this release uses a new version of the build scripts, which provide a better control over the content of the binary objects, and thus is able to further optimize the size of the libraries, resulting in slightly smaller archives.

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 documentation is available in the share/doc folder.

Build​

The binaries for all supported platforms (Windows, macOS and GNU/Linux) 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.

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.

CI tests​

Before publishing, a set of simple tests were performed on an exhaustive set of platforms. The results are available from:

Tests​

The binaries were tested on a variety of platforms, but mainly to check the integrity of the build, not the compiler functionality.

Checksums​

The SHA-256 hashes for the files are:

114dada87ac261243f38e66e27b3689f33c740b000b53e6581ef35664c1bdbd1
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-10.3.1-2.2-darwin-x64.tar.gz

3a4fab273e19f4136521352a7ca103452b4c9b17db2d0fd90ccc6b43e8e10e2e
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-10.3.1-2.2-linux-arm.tar.gz

d9a000218e4a56812e82a245105f93e6b7211442903f4c69ba91609206d690e0
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-10.3.1-2.2-linux-arm64.tar.gz

c74602f9a92844bf852b749ecdd7719030fb151781ed56383a544f439bee1add
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-10.3.1-2.2-linux-ia32.tar.gz

5ac203fdff965e77c07bb24509da740decb8da91f4d266414abe90401da3fd28
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-10.3.1-2.2-linux-x64.tar.gz

e4f1333ec79b418f7347a34f059676369d818aa400d91afc8f069457d605cb50
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-10.3.1-2.2-win32-ia32.zip

906424e6d9e3c3482b1f466635151e067419b58f7e1814f537478cc2001b82e3
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-10.3.1-2.2-win32-x64.zip

Deprecation notices​

32-bit support​

Support for 32-bit x86 GNU/Linux and x86 Windows will most probably be dropped in 2022. Support for 32-bit Arm GNU/Linux will be preserved for a while, due to the large user base of 32-bit Raspberry Pi systems.

GNU/Linux minimum requirements​

Support for RedHat 7 will most probably be dropped in 2022, and the minimum requirement will be raised to GLIBC 2.27, available starting with Ubuntu 18 and RedHat 8.

Download analytics​

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