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 separate binaries for Windows (Intel 32/64-bit), macOS (Intel 64-bit) and GNU/Linux (Intel 32/64-bit, Arm 32/64-bit).

Download

The binary files are available from GitHub releases.

Install

The full details of installing the xPack GNU RISC-V Embedded GCC on various platforms are presented in the separate Install page.

Easy install

The easiest way to install GNU RISC-V Embedded GCC is with xpm by using the binary xPack, available as @xpack-dev-tools/riscv-none-embed-gcc from the npmjs.com registry.

To install the latest version available, use:

xpm install --global @xpack-dev-tools/riscv-none-embed-gcc@latest --verbose

To install this specific version, use:

xpm install --global @xpack-dev-tools/riscv-none-embed-gcc@8.3.0-2.2.1

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.

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.

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.

Shared libraries

On all platforms the packages are standalone, and expect only the standard runtime to be present on the host.

All dependencies that are build as shared libraries are copied locally in the same folder as the executable.

DT_RPATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH

On GNU/Linux the binaries are adjusted to use a relative path:

$ readelf -d library.so | grep runpath
 0x000000000000001d (RPATH)            Library rpath: [$ORIGIN]

In the GNU ld.so search strategy, the DT_RPATH has the highest priority, higher than LD_LIBRARY_PATH, so if this later one is set in the environment, it should not interfere with the xPack binaries.

Please note that previous versions, up to mid-2020, used DT_RUNPATH, which has a priority lower than LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and does not tolerate setting it in the environment.

@executable_path

Similarly, on macOS, the binaries are adjusted with otool to use a relative path.

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.

  • Intel GNU/Linux: all binaries were built with GCC 9.3, running in an Ubuntu 12 Docker container
  • Arm GNU/Linux: all binaries were built with GCC 9.3, running in an Ubuntu 16 Docker container (added in mid-2020)
  • Windows: all binaries were built with mingw-w64 GCC 9.3, running in an Ubuntu 12 Docker container
  • 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:

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

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

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

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

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

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