Version 0.12.0-3 is a maintenance release; it updates to the latest upstream master.

The xPack OpenOCD is a standalone cross-platform binary distribution of OpenOCD.

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

Download

The binary files are available from GitHub Releases.

Prerequisites

  • x64 GNU/Linux: any system with GLIBC 2.27 or higher (like Ubuntu 18 or later, Debian 10 or later, RedHat 8 or later, Fedora 29 or later, etc)
  • arm64/arm GNU/Linux: any system with GLIBC 2.27 or higher (like Raspberry Pi OS, Ubuntu 18 or later, Debian 10 or later, RedHat 8 or later, Fedora 29 or later, etc)
  • x64 Windows: Windows 7 with the Universal C Runtime (UCRT), Windows 8, Windows 10
  • x64 macOS: 10.13 or later
  • arm64 macOS: 11.6 or later

Install

The full details of installing the xPack OpenOCD on various platforms are presented in the separate Install page.

Easy install

The easiest way to install OpenOCD is with xpm by using the binary xPack, available as @xpack-dev-tools/openocd from the npmjs.com registry.

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

cd my-project
xpm init # Add a package.json if not already present

xpm install @xpack-dev-tools/openocd@latest --verbose

ls -l xpacks/.bin

To install this specific version, use:

xpm install @xpack-dev-tools/openocd@0.12.0-3.1 --verbose

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

xpm install --global @xpack-dev-tools/openocd@latest --verbose

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

Uninstall

To remove the links created by xpm in the current project:

cd my-project

xpm uninstall @xpack-dev-tools/openocd

To completely remove the package from the central xPack store:

xpm uninstall --global @xpack-dev-tools/openocd

Compliance

The xPack OpenOCD generally follows the official OpenOCD releases.

The current version is based on:

  • OpenOCD version 0.12.0, the development commit dd175827 from 1 Apr 2024.

Changes

There are no functional changes.

Compared to the upstream, the following changes were applied:

  • the src/openocd.c file was edited to display the branding string
  • the contrib/60-openocd.rules file was simplified to avoid protection related issues.

Bug fixes

  • none

Enhancements

  • none

Known problems

  • none

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.

@rpath and @loader_path

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

Documentation

The original documentation is available online:

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.

For the prerequisites and more details on the build procedure, please see the How to build 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 testes on Windows 11 Pro, Intel Ubuntu 22 LTS and macOS 14.5.

Install the package with xpm.

The simple test, consists in starting the binaries only to identify the STM32F4DISCOVERY board.

~/Library/xPacks/@xpack-dev-tools/openocd/0.12.0-3.1/.content/bin/openocd -f board/stm32f4discovery.cfg

A more complex test consist in programming and debugging a simple blinky application on the STM32F4DISCOVERY board. The binaries were those generated by the simple Eclipse projects available in the xPack GNU Arm Embedded GCC project.

Checksums

The SHA-256 hashes for the files are:

0084761ef77a5c3f2e098993f17cb4225819462b90c1378a1b35cea9cd466288
xpack-openocd-0.12.0-3-darwin-arm64.tar.gz

47931a1adde58ae6a7d99e4b0db5b9a62c568ce8e5232e958325d733f09e9995
xpack-openocd-0.12.0-3-darwin-x64.tar.gz

8f956ed0c5027c5e655fe590712aef2dbd21a01777b5c008f772b2d1b45fb095
xpack-openocd-0.12.0-3-linux-arm.tar.gz

892b2ecc624521e5947e4857d7dfd4af03e19ef37da73ae91215a1001864ed75
xpack-openocd-0.12.0-3-linux-arm64.tar.gz

98c07aa34c6e02ac6ef0794494bc3bd9e2409d587723c5191ee4f0a4d179e39b
xpack-openocd-0.12.0-3-linux-x64.tar.gz

94b51be5e5b38ac1c5814972eee9b062f0805bcd3ecc3bad5190fd659f6a3ab3
xpack-openocd-0.12.0-3-win32-x64.zip

Deprecation notices

Linux minimum requirements

The minimum requirement is GLIBC 2.27, available starting with Ubuntu 18, Debian 10 and RedHat 8. Support for RedHat 7 was dropped in 2022.

32-bit support

Support for 32-bit Intel Linux and Intel Windows was dropped in 2022.

Pre-deprecation notice for 32-bit Arm Linux

Due to the large user base of 32-bit Raspberry Pi systems, support for 32-bit Arm Linux (armv7l) will be preserved for a little while, but expect it to be dropped by 2025, so it is recommended to consider an upgrade to a RPi 4 or 5 with at least 4 GB (preferably 8 GB) of RAM.

Pre-deprecation notice for Ubuntu 18.04

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver reached the end of the standard five-year maintenance window for Long-Term Support (LTS) release on 31 May 2023.

As a courtesy, the xPack GNU/Linux releases will continue to be based on Ubuntu 18.04 for another year.

From 2025 onwards, the GNU/Linux binaries will be built on Debian 10, (GLIBC 2.28), and are also expected to run on RedHat 8.

Users are urged to update their build and test infrastructure to ensure a smooth transition to the next xPack releases.

Download analytics

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