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xPack GNU RISC-V Embedded GCC v8.3.0-2.2 released

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

Version 8.3.0-2.2 is a maintenance release of the xPack GNU RISC-V Embedded GCC, to fix a regression bug in binutils 2.32 affecting the parsing of LENGTH and ORIGIN in linker scripts.

The xPack GNU RISC-V Embedded GCC is the xPack distribution of the SiFive RISC-V GCC.

There are binaries for x64 Windows, 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/riscv-none-elf-gcc@8.3.0-2.2.1 -verbose

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

Compliance​

Starting with 8.2.0-2, the xPack GNU RISC-V Embedded GCC (formerly GNU MCU Eclipse RISC-V GCC) follows the official SiFive releases, with as little differences as possible.

This release is based on the v2020.04.0-Toolchain.Only release, and includes the SiFive extensions.

The following commits (from sifive/freedom-tools) were used:

Supported libraries​

The supported libraries are:

$ riscv-none-embed-gcc -print-multi-lib
.;
rv32e/ilp32e;@march=rv32e@mabi=ilp32e
rv32ea/ilp32e;@march=rv32ea@mabi=ilp32e
rv32em/ilp32e;@march=rv32em@mabi=ilp32e
rv32eac/ilp32e;@march=rv32eac@mabi=ilp32e
rv32emac/ilp32e;@march=rv32emac@mabi=ilp32e
rv32i/ilp32;@march=rv32i@mabi=ilp32
rv32if/ilp32f;@march=rv32if@mabi=ilp32f
rv32ifd/ilp32d;@march=rv32ifd@mabi=ilp32d
rv32ia/ilp32;@march=rv32ia@mabi=ilp32
rv32iaf/ilp32f;@march=rv32iaf@mabi=ilp32f
rv32imaf/ilp32f;@march=rv32imaf@mabi=ilp32f
rv32iafd/ilp32d;@march=rv32iafd@mabi=ilp32d
rv32im/ilp32;@march=rv32im@mabi=ilp32
rv32imf/ilp32f;@march=rv32imf@mabi=ilp32f
rv32imfc/ilp32f;@march=rv32imfc@mabi=ilp32f
rv32imfd/ilp32d;@march=rv32imfd@mabi=ilp32d
rv32iac/ilp32;@march=rv32iac@mabi=ilp32
rv32imac/ilp32;@march=rv32imac@mabi=ilp32
rv32imafc/ilp32f;@march=rv32imafc@mabi=ilp32f
rv32imafdc/ilp32d;@march=rv32imafdc@mabi=ilp32d
rv64i/lp64;@march=rv64i@mabi=lp64
rv64if/lp64f;@march=rv64if@mabi=lp64f
rv64ifd/lp64d;@march=rv64ifd@mabi=lp64d
rv64ia/lp64;@march=rv64ia@mabi=lp64
rv64iaf/lp64f;@march=rv64iaf@mabi=lp64f
rv64imaf/lp64f;@march=rv64imaf@mabi=lp64f
rv64iafd/lp64d;@march=rv64iafd@mabi=lp64d
rv64im/lp64;@march=rv64im@mabi=lp64
rv64imf/lp64f;@march=rv64imf@mabi=lp64f
rv64imfc/lp64f;@march=rv64imfc@mabi=lp64f
rv64imfd/lp64d;@march=rv64imfd@mabi=lp64d
rv64iac/lp64;@march=rv64iac@mabi=lp64
rv64imac/lp64;@march=rv64imac@mabi=lp64
rv64imafc/lp64f;@march=rv64imafc@mabi=lp64f
rv64imafdc/lp64d;@march=rv64imafdc@mabi=lp64d

Changes​

Improvements​

Compared to the original SiFive version, the same architecture and API options are supported, and there are minimal functional changes

  • libgloss was removed from the list of libraries always linked to the application, since it issues ECALL instructions that fail in bare metal environments

newlib-nano​

Support for newlib-nano is available using the --specs=nano.specs option. For better results, this option must be added to both compile and link time.

nosys.specs​

If no syscalls are needed, --specs=nosys.specs can be used at link time to provide empty implementations for the POSIX system calls.

Compile options​

The libraries are compiled with -O2 -mcmodel=medany. The nano version is compiled with -Os -mcmodel=medany.

caution

It is mandatory for the applications to be compiled with -mcmodel=medany, otherwise the link will fail.

Python​

Support for Python scripting was added to GDB. This distribution provides a separate binary, riscv-none-embed-gdb-py3 with support for Python 3.7.

It is mandatory to have exactly this version 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/riscv-none-embed-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)')" \
riscv-none-embed-gdb-py3 "$@"
__EOF__
chmod +x "${HOME}/opt/bin/riscv-none-embed-gdb-py3.sh"

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​

  • binutils 2.32 introduced a regression bug 24289 which prevented MEMORY regions to use LENGTH and ORIGIN. The bug was fixed in binutils 2.33.1 via commit 912ebfa. In this release, on top of the SiFive sources, this commit was applied via git cherry pick, and LENGTH and ORIGIN are now recognised as expected.

Known problems​

  • the GDB binary with Python support was built with version 3.7, and require exactly this version in order to run properly; fixed in 8.3.0-2.3 which includes the Python run-time;
  • GDB may issue the following warning, riscv-none-embed-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);
  • the archive size got too big for the Windows 32-bit node to handle, and xpm install fails with RangeError: Array buffer allocation failed.

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 10.14.

The tests consist in building and debugging some simple Eclipse projects available in the build project.

Since the source code used for GCC is identical to the one used by SiFive, the long and complex tests performed by SiFive to validate their release were not executed again.

Checksums​

The SHA-256 hashes for the files are:

b6da62479b647224e766a1a9012280893b38f8df9511976c3ed0702fb9ffb517
xpack-riscv-none-embed-gcc-8.3.0-2.2-darwin-x64.tar.gz

1e396808c101f8814efe9e24111fb19c6aaa27356851e8dac45ba59711e37260
xpack-riscv-none-embed-gcc-8.3.0-2.2-linux-arm64.tar.gz

6ffa467e0b5fb6e6e8ab3eea5b0b0b9a469800da7ca09413a00f58f386472e88
xpack-riscv-none-embed-gcc-8.3.0-2.2-linux-arm.tar.gz

eae41c21f4b85e110deabad602b6ef2ad3e69812054b21c77b85a4e01ec4be02
xpack-riscv-none-embed-gcc-8.3.0-2.2-linux-x32.tar.gz

7c9fab87c6ef4e029e6a562ff30620cbb2b23573620c32b7c24f61192868dfe1
xpack-riscv-none-embed-gcc-8.3.0-2.2-linux-x64.tar.gz

d0834c35ae2212d5051dc5f147d90881d4aae4f27ec858a841c4dd6649917641
xpack-riscv-none-embed-gcc-8.3.0-2.2-win32-x32.zip

7e0e6a84b42104698dd6ddcbf725da59ef6e20c36ac1643b210e93764c7a95c6
xpack-riscv-none-embed-gcc-8.3.0-2.2-win32-x64.zip

Download analytics​

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