The Linaro Binary Toolchain ============================

The Linaro GCC 6.3-2017.02-rc2 Release-Candidate 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-candidate packages from:

(sources) http://snapshots.linaro.org/components/toolchain/gcc-linaro/6.3-2017.02-rc2/ (binaries) http://snapshots.linaro.org/components/toolchain/binaries/6.3-2017.02-rc2/

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/

A description of the arm and Aarch64 target triples can be found at:

https://collaborate.linaro.org/display/TCWGPUB/ARM+and+AArch64+Target+Triple...

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

Package Versions ================= Linaro GCC 6.3-2017.02-rc2

http://snapshots.linaro.org/components/toolchain/gcc-linaro/6.3-2017.02-rc2/

Linaro glibc 2.23 (linaro/2.23/master)

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2016-02/msg00009.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%3Ba=blob_plain%3Bf=...

Linaro GDB 7.12 (gdb-7.12-branch)

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2016-10/msg00007.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-rc2) ==================================================

* 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.

https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=78253

Linaro bugzilla #2562: ARM GCC 5.2 call weak function instead of strong when called through pointer

https://bugs.linaro.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2562

* MS Windows does not support symlinks and the MS Windows archive extractor does not properly deep copy the symlink target files/directories into the symlinked directory structure when unpacking the toolchain archive. This causes problems with missing dependencies when using the Linaro mingw toolchains, as identified in the following bugs:

https://bugs.linaro.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2684 https://bugs.linaro.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2192 https://bugs.linaro.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2762

This has been solved by copying files rather than using symlinks when the mingw targetted toolchain archives are created.

https://review.linaro.org/#/c/16415/

* Users of Linaro's toolchain have encountered problems when building projects with Autotools (specifically libtool):

https://bugs.linaro.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2764

The Linaro binary toolchain release contained files with a .la suffix as artifacts of the toolchain build process. These .la files are helper files for libtool, but unlike a gcc install tree, they are not position independent and contain full paths. Since these artifacts contain absolute paths they can actually mislead user invocation of libtool into not finding required libraries (because they reference the build tree, not the install location) and hence breaking Autotools builds. These *.la file artifacts have been removed from Linaro toolchain binaries because they are unnecessary for users.

* The Linaro GCC 6.3-2017.01 snapshot added further enablement for ARMv8-M and these have been incorporated into this release.

* Compiling and statically linking some SPEC2006int tests against tcmalloc have been failing due to a problem with glibc's memory allocator function overrides. This was fixed upstream:

https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=20432

Backported into Linaro glibc 2.23:

commit 058b5a41d56b9a8860dede14d97dd443792d064b Author: Florian Weimer fweimer@redhat.com Date: Fri Aug 26 22:40:27 2016 +0200 malloc: Simplify static malloc interposition [BZ #20432]

* Host binaries for x86_64 linux hosts now have symbols and debug information stripped in order to reduce the size of the toolchain binary archives. This reduces the archive size from 1.5G to 600M for aarch64-linux-gnu target with the gcc-6-branch.

* The GDB version was upgraded from GDB 7.11 in the Linaro GCC 6.1-2016.08 release to GDB 7.12 in the Linaro GCC 6.2-2016.11 release.

* The Linaro GCC 6.2-2016.10 snapshot added AArch32 support for ARMv8.2 and ARMv8m, as well as some AArch64 fixes for ARMv8.2, and bug fixes merged from FSF GCC 6.2. This is available in the binary toolchain as of Linaro GCC 6.2-2016.11.

* Basic tuning support for the Qualcomm qdf24xx was added to the Linaro GCC 6.2-2016.10 snapshot and is available in the binary toolchain as of Linaro GCC 6.2-2016.11.

* IFUNC was disabled for baremetal targets, as it was causing test-suite failures, and is presently a Linux only feature.

* The gold linker was added to this binary release.

* Backported malloc_lock fix into Linaro newlib 2.4.

commit 2665915cfc46aa6403bb2efd473c523d3167e0cb Author: Andre Vieira (lists) Andre.SimoesDiasVieira@arm.com Date: Thu Jun 16 12:23:51 2016 +0100 Re-enable malloc_lock for newlib-nano

* Backported rawmemchr patch into Linaro newlib 2.4.

commit e7b1ee2ea6aa3ee1da41976407410e6202a098c5 Author: Wilco Dijkstra Wilco.Dijkstra@arm.com Date: Thu May 12 16:16:58 2016 +0000 Add rawmemchr

* Backported strlen fix when using Thumb-2 and -Os -marm into Linaro newlib 2.4.

commit 5c02bcc086a96b174e1b9e1445a4a1770070107a Author: Jeff Johnston jjohnstn@redhat.com Date: Wed May 11 17:18:48 2016 -0400 Fix strlen using Thumb-2 with -Os -marm

* Backported fix for semihosting ARM when heapinfo not provided by debugger into Linaro newlib 2.4.

commit 5c9403eaf40951f8a4f55ed65f661b485ff44be7 Author: David Hoover spm2@dangerous.li Date: Thu Apr 21 07:12:24 2016 +0200 Fixed semihosting for ARM when heapinfo not provided by debugger.

* Merged latest FSF glibc release/2.23/master into Linaro glibc 2.23.

* Backported __ASSUME_REQUEUE_PI check Linaro glibc 2.23 branch.

commit 2d20c3bf918cd94ebd4106693adb3a5c9272baba Author: Adhemerval Zanella adhemerval.zanella@linaro.org Date: Tue May 17 10:16:39 2016 -0300 Add runtime check for __ASSUME_REQUEUE_PI (BZ# 18463)

* Backported removal of __ASSUME_SET_ROBUST_LIST from Linaro glibc 2.23 branch.

commit bb8f09d72756186a3d82a1f7b2adcf8bc1fbaed1 Author: Adhemerval Zanella adhemerval.zanella@linaro.org Date: Mon May 16 19:01:10 2016 -0300 Remove __ASSUME_SET_ROBUST_LIST

* Backported removal of __ASSUME_FUTEX_LOCK_PI from Linaro glibc 2.23 branch.

commit e48b4e7fed0de06dd7832ead48bea8ebc813a204 Author: Adhemerval Zanella adhemerval.zanella@linaro.org Date: Mon May 16 10:35:25 2016 -0300 Remove __ASSUME_FUTEX_LOCK_PI

* Merged latest FSF binutils-2_27-branch into linaro_binutils-2_27-branch.

* The libwinpthread DLL is now copied into the host bin directory to satisfy mingw package dependencies.

* Backported GNU Linker fix.

commit fbc6c6763e70cb2376e2de990c7fc54c0ee44a59 Author: Nick Clifton nickc@redhat.com Date: Tue Aug 23 09:45:11 2016 +0100 Fix seg-fault in ARM linker when trying to parse a binary file.

* Backported GNU Assembler fix for PR 20364

commit 5fe7ebe5ab43750abf8f490b785d99a1e598e7fd Author: Nick Clifton nickc@redhat.com Date: Fri Aug 5 10:37:57 2016 +0100 Fix the generation of alignment frags in code sections for AArch64.

https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=20364

* Performance related backports from the following snapshots have been included: Linaro GCC 6.1-2016.06, Linaro GCC 6.1-2016.07, Linaro GCC 6.1-2016.08, Linaro GCC 6.2-2016.09, Linaro GCC 6.2-2016.10, Linaro GCC 6.2-2016.11, Linaro GCC 6.2-2016.12, and Linaro GCC 6.3-2017.01.

See the following Linaro GCC snapshots:

http://snapshots.linaro.org/components/toolchain/gcc-linaro/6.1-2016.06/ http://snapshots.linaro.org/components/toolchain/gcc-linaro/6.1-2016.07/ http://snapshots.linaro.org/components/toolchain/gcc-linaro/6.1-2016.08/ http://snapshots.linaro.org/components/toolchain/gcc-linaro/6.2-2016.09/ http://snapshots.linaro.org/components/toolchain/gcc-linaro/6.2-2016.10/ http://snapshots.linaro.org/components/toolchain/gcc-linaro/6.2-2016.11/ http://snapshots.linaro.org/components/toolchain/gcc-linaro/6.2-2016.12/ http://snapshots.linaro.org/components/toolchain/gcc-linaro/6.3-2017.01/

Contact Linaro ===============

File bugs at http://bugs.linaro.org

For Linaro member support see http://support.linaro.org

For Linaro community support email linaro-toolchain@lists.linaro.org