Bootlin toolchains updated, 2021.11 release

Bootlin has been offering since 2017 a large set of ready to use pre-compiled cross-compilation toolchains at toolchains.bootlin.com. These toolchains are available for a wide range of CPU architectures and CPU variants, and support either the glibc, uClibc-ng or musl C libraries, where applicable.

It’s been quite some time since the last release of those toolchains, so we took the opportunity of this quiet period between Christmas and New Year to finally update the toolchains. We’re happy to announce that we have now published a total of 187 toolchains targeting 46 different CPU architecture variants. As the toolchain release name suggests, they are now built with Buildroot 2021.11.

The most important changes are the following ones:

  • The so-called stable toolchains are now based on gcc 10.3.0, binutils 2.36.1, Linux headers 4.9, gdb 10.2, glibc 2.34, uClibc 1.0.39 and musl 1.2.2
  • The so-called bleeding-edge toolchains are now based on gcc 11.2, binutils 2.37, Linux headers 5.4, gdb 11.1, glibc 2.34, uClibc 1.0.39 and musl 1.2.2
  • The riscv64 toolchains (targeting the LP64 ABI) have been replaced by riscv64-lp64d toolchains (targeting the LP64D ABI), making them more generally useful.
  • Runtime testing using Qemu has been added for RISC-V 64-bit, m68k-68xxx and OpenRISC.
  • The gdb cross-debugger is now compiled with both Python and TUI support.
  • Internally, there’s been some significant refactoring of the scripts and Gitlab CI pipelines that control the build and testing of those toolchains. Many thanks to Romain Naour for providing the ground work that enabled this refactoring.

The toolchains can be directly downloaded from toolchains.bootlin.com. We have also submitted a patch to Buildroot that updates those toolchains, which are directly usable in Buildroot as external toolchains.

Author: Thomas Petazzoni

Thomas Petazzoni is Bootlin's co-owner and CEO. Thomas joined Bootlin in 2008 as a kernel and embedded Linux engineer, became CTO in 2013, and co-owner/CEO in 2021. More details...

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