The GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain is a collection of packages such as GCC, GDB, etc. used for embedded systems software development. Follow the steps in this guide in order to properly install the latest version of the toolchain.
If you wish to automatically install the Arm GNU Toolchain for Linux, please run the following command:
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Cascoda/cascoda-sdk/master/etc/arm_gnu_toolchain_setup.sh | bash; source /etc/profile
If you wish to manually install the toolchain instead, follow the steps outlined below.
It is important to uninstall whatever existing version of the toolchain that might have been installed on your system using your linux distribution’s package manager. Installations not done directly from the Arm developer website can result in various issues down the line. To do that, run the following command:
sudo apt-get remove gcc-arm-none-eabi
Check that this worked by typing the following command:
arm-none-eabi-gcc --version
This should result in something that looks like the following (exact output differs slightly between linux distributions):
-bash: arm-none-eabi-gcc: command not found
Type the following command to grab the latest version number from the official website.
ARM_TOOLCHAIN_VERSION=$(curl -s https://developer.arm.com/downloads/-/gnu-rm | grep -Po '<h3>Version \K.+(?= <span)')
Then type the following to download the archive file of that version.
curl -Lo gcc-arm-none-eabi.tar.bz2 "https://developer.arm.com/-/media/Files/downloads/gnu-rm/${ARM_TOOLCHAIN_VERSION}/gcc-arm-none-eabi-${ARM_TOOLCHAIN_VERSION}-x86_64-linux.tar.bz2"
Create a new directory to store the toolchain files.
sudo mkdir /opt/gcc-arm-none-eabi
Extract the toolchain files to the specified directory.
sudo tar xf gcc-arm-none-eabi.tar.bz2 --strip-components=1 -C /opt/gcc-arm-none-eabi
Add /opt/gcc-arm-none-eabi/bin directory to the PATH environment variable.
echo 'export PATH=/opt/gcc-arm-none-eabi/bin:$PATH' | sudo tee -a /etc/profile.d/gcc-arm-none-eabi.sh
For those changes to take effect, run the following command.
source /etc/profile
Check that the installation was successful by checking the version of the compilers.
user@hostname:~$ arm-none-eabi-gcc --version
arm-none-eabi-gcc (GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain 10.3-2021.10) 10.3.1 20210824 (release)
Copyright (C) 2020 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
user@hostname:~$ arm-none-eabi-g++ --version
arm-none-eabi-g++ (GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain 10.3-2021.10) 10.3.1 20210824 (release)
Copyright (C) 2020 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Install libncurses5, which is a dependency necessary for arm-none-eabi-gdb, which is a debugger.
sudo apt-get install libncurses5
Check that this worked by checking the version of the debugger.
user@hostname:~$ arm-none-eabi-gdb --version
GNU gdb (GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain 10.3-2021.10) 10.2.90.20210621-git
Copyright (C) 2021 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
Remove the now unnecessary archive file (or keep it if you prefer).
rm -rf gcc-arm-none-eabi.tar.bz2
Create a main.c file:
nano main.c
Add the following code:
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
printf("Hello world\n");
return 0;
}
Compile the program.
arm-none-eabi-gcc --specs=rdimon.specs main.c -o test
Now use the file command to verify that the executable generated is for ARM architecture.
user@hostname:~$ file test
test: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, EABI5 version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, not stripped
If you want to completely remove the GNU Arm Embedded toolchain, delete the installation diretory.
sudo rm -rf /opt/gcc-arm-none-eabi
Remove gcc-arm-none-eabi.sh file that is used to set the environment variable.
sudo rm -rf /etc/profile.d/gcc-arm-none-eabi.sh