Version 10.2.1-1.1 is a new release of xPack GNU Arm Embedded GCC, following Arm release from Dec 11, 2020 (version 10-2020-q4-major).

The xPack GNU Arm Embedded GCC is the xPack distribution of the GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain.

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 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@10.2.1-1.1.2

Compliance

  • GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain release 10-2020-q4-major from December 11, 2020 and uses the gcc-arm-none-eabi-10-2020-q4-major-src.tar.bz2 source invariant. It includes:
    • GCC 10.2.1
    • binutils 2.35
    • newlib 3.3.0
    • GDB 10.1

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
thumb/v8.1-m.main+mve/hard;@mthumb@march=armv8.1-m.main+mve@mfloat-abi=hard

Changes

Compared to the Arm version, 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-10.2.1-1.1 instead of the hierarchical xPacks/arm-none-eabi-gcc/10.2.1-1.1. 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 a separate binary, arm-none-eabi-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

  • 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 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 rpath
 0x000000000000001d (RPATH)            Library runpath: [$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
  • Intel 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 10.13.

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:

061615d3e35d026cfa3ef8999f2bdaef2181b56e61029f58c8e0f1054bba046b
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-10.2.1-1.1-darwin-x64.tar.gz

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xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-10.2.1-1.1-linux-arm64.tar.gz

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xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-10.2.1-1.1-linux-arm.tar.gz

8adaca8af367a54d1acd2b274cfdc18384b87fbe0ba613322ea3ead20677a132
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-10.2.1-1.1-linux-ia32.tar.gz

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xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-10.2.1-1.1-linux-x64.tar.gz

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xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-10.2.1-1.1-win32-ia32.zip

adfd5e940f3cb27589e7ea06d41291559fe37d74a475922eb80b7d34e1810968
xpack-arm-none-eabi-gcc-10.2.1-1.1-win32-x64.zip

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