The Linaro Binary Toolchain
The Linaro GCC 6.3-2017.02 Release is now available.
The GCC 6 Release series has significant changes from the GCC 5
release series. For an explanation of the changes please see the
following website:
https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-6/changes.html
For help in porting to GCC 6 please see the following explanation:
https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-6/porting_to.html
Download release packages from:
(sources)
http://releases.linaro.org/components/toolchain/gcc-linaro/6.3-2017.02/
(binaries)
http://releases.linaro.org/components/toolchain/binaries/6.3-2017.02/
Previous snapshots and release-candidates are at:
http://snapshots.linaro.org/components/toolchain/binaries/
Previous releases are at:
http://releases.linaro.org/components/toolchain/binaries/
Supported Targets
==
The Linaro binary toolchain is a collection of x86-hosted GNU
cross-toolchains targeting a variety of ARM architecture targets.
Linaro TCWG provides these toolchains as a service to our members.
Due to hardware availability, system-image availability, validation
complexity, and user-base size, not all host and target toolchain
combinations can be validated by Linaro with the same rigor.
The most rigorously validated targets are little-endian and hardfloat
implementations of the 32-bit ARMv7 (arm), 32-bit ARMv8 (armv8), and
64-bit ARMv8 (aarch64) architectures. Linaro recommends those targets
to our members.
A full list of the supported arm and AArch64 target triples can be
found here:
https://collaborate.linaro.org/display/TCWGPUB/ARM+and+AArch64+Target+Triples
Host Requirements
==
Linaro officially supports the current and previous Ubuntu LTS
releases (as of the time of this release). This does not mean that
the toolchain will not work on other/older Linux distributions. See
the following for the life-time of Ubuntu LTS releases.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases
The host system upon which the cross-compiler will run requires a
minimum of glibc 2.14, because of API changes to glibc's memcpy API.
https://bugs.linaro.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1869
Linaro recommends using the 64-bit x86_64 host toolchains as the
32-bit i686 host toolchains and the 32-bit mingw host toolchains will
only be provided as long as there is sufficient member interest to
justify their continued availability.
Package Versions
=
Linaro GCC 6.3-2017.02
http://releases.linaro.org/components/toolchain/gcc-linaro/6.3-2017.02/
Linaro glibc 2.23 (linaro/2.23/master)
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2016-02/msg9.html
Linaro newlib 2.4-2016.03 (linaro_2.4-branch)
https://sourceware.org/ml/newlib/2016/msg00370.html
Linaro binutils 2.27 (linaro_binutils-2_27-branch)
https://sourceware.org/git/gitweb.cgi?p=binutils-gdb.git;a=blob_plain;f=binutils/NEWS;hb=refs/tags/binutils-2_27
Linaro GDB 7.12 (gdb-7.12-branch)
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2016-10/msg7.html
Linaro toolchain package git branches are hosted at:
http://git.linaro.org/toolchain
NEWS for GCC 6 (as of Linaro GCC 6.3-2017.02)
==
* Previous versions of the Linaro GCC 6 toolchain were incorrectly
generating floating-point code for soft-float Linux targets
(arm-linux-gnueabi, and armeb-linux-gnueabi). This escaped detection
until recently because the soft-float targeted toolchains were
configured to use general-purpose registers for passing floating-point
values (which is what you would expect for soft-float toolchains) and
the intra-routine floating-code was not noticed.
The issue would only show up on targets that were run on hardware that
truly didn't have floating-point hardware where the kernel did not
trap and emulate floating-point routines. This has been solved in
Linaro GCC 6.3-2017.02-rc2 by configuring the toolchain (using
--with-float=soft) to generate code without any floating-point
instructions at all (-mfloat-abi=soft).
https://review.linaro.org/#/c/16968/2
This change should not break compatibility between existing binaries
compiled with these toolchains since the float-point parameter passing
ABI is still the same.
* A bug/regression in the compiler has been identified whereby the
target function that is invoked when calling a "weak" function
directly is the "strong" override, whereas when calling the function
via a pointer the "weak" implementation is used. This would be
noticed as inconsistent function invocation when invoking directly vs.
invoking via function pointer. This issue only affected 32-bit arm
targets. This regression has been fixed upstream and backported into
Linaro GCC 6.3-2017.02-rc2.
GCC PR target/78253: [5/6/7 Regression] [ARM] call weak function
instead of strong when called through pointer.
