Version 9.3.1-1.1 is a new release of xPack GNU Arm Embedded GCC, following Arm release from June 01, 2020 (version 9-2020-q2-update). This is also the first release that adds support for running on Arm platforms, like Raspberry Pi.

This is the xPack distribution of the GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain.

There are separate binaries for Windows, macOS and GNU/Linux, 32/64-bit.

Starting with this version, support for 32/64-bit Arm GNU/Linux platforms, like Raspberry Pi, was added.

Download

The binary files are available from GitHub Releases.

Install

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

Easy install

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

To install the latest version available, use:

xpm install --global @xpack-dev-tools/arm-none-eabi-gcc@latest --verbose

To install this specific version, use:

xpm install --global @xpack-dev-tools/arm-none-eabi-gcc@9.3.1-1.1.1

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

Bug fixes

  • none

Changes

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-9.3.1-1.1 instead of the hierarchical xPacks/arm-none-eabi-gcc/9.3.1-1.1. 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 two separate binaries, arm-none-eabi-gdb-py with Python 2.7 support, and arm-none-eabi-gdb-py3 with support for Python 3.7.

It is mandatory to have exactly those versions 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/arm-none-eabi-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)')" \
arm-none-eabi-gdb-py3 "$@"
__EOF__
chmod +x "${HOME}/opt/bin/arm-none-eabi-gdb-py3.sh"

Text User Interface (TUI)

Support for TUI was added to GDB. The ncurses library (v6.2) was added to the distribution.

Known problems

  • the GDB binaries with Python support were built with version 2.7/3.7, and require exactly those versions in order to run properly;
  • C++ exceptions in the non-nano libraries are not caught; fixed in 9.3.1-1.2.

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.

runpath

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

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

Please note that in the GNU ld.so search strategy, the DT_RUNPATH has lower priority than LD_LIBRARY_PATH, so if this later one is set in the environment, it might interfere with the xPack binaries.

@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.

  • 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
  • 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

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:

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xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-9.3.1-1.1-darwin-x64.tar.gz

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xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-9.3.1-1.1-linux-arm64.tar.gz

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xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-9.3.1-1.1-linux-arm.tar.gz

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xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-9.3.1-1.1-linux-x32.tar.gz

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xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-9.3.1-1.1-linux-x64.tar.gz

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xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-9.3.1-1.1-win32-x32.zip

91ab5e1b9b3ffcc606262e2be96bd70ab0be26a42d21e610340412f65de2bb16
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-9.3.1-1.1-win32-x64.zip

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