Version 10.2.0-1.1 is a new release; it follows the upstream Sifive release v2020.12.0 from April 7, 2021.

The xPack GNU RISC-V Embedded GCC is a standalone cross-platform binary 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 64-bit).

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)
  • Arm GNU/Linux 64-bit: 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); (there is no Arm 32-bit image!);
  • x86/x64 Windows: Windows 7 with the Universal C Runtime (UCRT), Windows 8, Windows 10
  • x64 macOS: 10.13 or later

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.

With the xpm tool available, installing the latest version of the package and adding it as a dependency for a project is quite easy:

cd my-project
xpm init # Only at first use.

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

ls -l xpacks/.bin

To install this specific version, use:

xpm install @xpack-dev-tools/riscv-none-embed-gcc@10.2.0-1.1.1

For xPacks aware tools, like the Eclipse Embedded C/C++ plug-ins, it is also possible to install GNU RISC-V Embedded GCC globally, in the user home folder.

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

Eclipse will automatically identify binaries installed with xpm and provide a convenient method to manage paths.

Uninstall

To remove the links from the current project:

cd my-project

xpm uninstall @xpack-dev-tools/riscv-none-embed-gcc

To completely remove the package from the central xPacks store:

xpm uninstall --global @xpack-dev-tools/riscv-none-embed-gcc

Compliance

The xPack GNU RISC-V Embedded GCC generally follows the official SiFive RISC-V GCC releases), with as little differences as possible.

The current version is based on:

  • SiFive RISC-V GCC release v2020.12.0 from April 7, 2021, and includes the SiFive extensions, including the RVV vector support.

Changes

There are no functional 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.

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.

Bug fixes

  • none

Enhancements

  • none

Known problems

  • the SiFive v2020.12.0 release no longer includes libraries without the C (compressed) instructions; the list of multi-libs was expanded with 28 more libraries in v10.2.0-1.2
  • due to the very large number of instructions added by the vector support (~70K), the compiler sources became too large and it was not possible to build the Arm 32-bit image (#229)
  • the archive size got too big for the Windows 32-bit node to handle, and xpm install may fail with RangeError: Array buffer allocation failed; the 64-bit systems are not affected.

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 libexec folder (or in the same folder as the executable for Windows).

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 documentation is available in the share/doc folder.

Build

The binaries for all supported platforms (Windows, macOS and Intel & Arm 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:

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xpack-riscv-none-embed-gcc-10.2.0-1.1-linux-arm64.tar.gz

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xpack-riscv-none-embed-gcc-10.2.0-1.1-linux-ia32.tar.gz

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xpack-riscv-none-embed-gcc-10.2.0-1.1-linux-x64.tar.gz

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xpack-riscv-none-embed-gcc-10.2.0-1.1-win32-ia32.zip

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xpack-riscv-none-embed-gcc-10.2.0-1.1-win32-x64.zip

Deprecation notices

32-bit support

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

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.