Toolchains for ARC Processors

Toolchains for Baremetal Targets

GNU toolchains for baremetal ARC targets consist of GCC, Binutils, GDB and a standard library. Newlib standard library is used for building baremetal applications. This table depicts which GCC driver should be used depending on ISA:

ISA	Driver/Triplet	Driver/Triplet (alias)	Families	Endianness
ARCv3	arc64-elf-gcc	arc64-snps-elf-gcc	ARC HS6x, ARC HS5x	Little1
ARCv2	arc-elf32-gcc	arc-snps-elf-gcc	ARC HS, ARC EM	Little
ARCv2	arceb-elf32-gcc	arceb-snps-elf-gcc	ARC HS, ARC EM	Big
ARCompact	arc-elf32-gcc	arc-snps-elf-gcc	ARC 700, ARC 600	Little
ARCompact	arceb-elf32-gcc	arceb-snps-elf-gcc	ARC 700, ARC 600	Big

Note that binaries for both ARCv1 and ARCv2 may be built using a single arc-elf32-gcc driver. It means that there is a single toolchain for two ISAs.

Prebuilt toolchains for ARCv3 families on the release page are configured with arc64-elf- prefix only and work both with HS5x and HS6x families. However, you can configure the toolchain for HS5x with arc32-elf- prefix using Crosstool-NG configuration menu.

Toolchains for Linux Targets

There is a set of GNU toolchains for ARC processors which allow to build and debug applications for Linux. The Linux kernel itself for ARC processors may be built using both baremetal and Linux toolchains.

Linux toolchains are presented for all ARC processor families except ARC EM and ARC 600. Two Linux standard libraries are currently supported: glibc and uClibc-ng. This table depicts which GCC driver should be used depending on CPU family:

Family	Standard library	Driver/Triplet
ARC 700	glibc	arc-linux-gnu-gcc
ARC 700	uClibc-ng	arc-linux-uclibc-gcc
ARC HS3x/4x	glibc	arc-linux-gnu-gcc
ARC HS3x/4x	uClibc-ng	arc-linux-uclibc-gcc
ARC HS5x	uClibc-ng	arc32-linux-uclibc-gcc
ARC HS6x	glibc	arc64-linux-gnu-gcc

Note, that in case of Linux toolchains, arc-linux-* drivers for ARC 700 and ARC HS are different toolchains! For example, if you want to build applications for ARC 700 Linux targets, then you need to use a particular toolchain for ARC 700 and the same is applicable for ARC HS, though they have the same names.

Native Toolchains for Linux Targets

Native toolchains are toolchains that can be used on the targets Linux system natively. Here is a list of native toolchains which are available on a release page:

Family	Standard library	Driver/Triplet
ARC HS3x/4x	glibc	arc-linux-gnu-gcc
ARC HS5x	uClibc-ng	arc32-linux-uclibc-gcc
ARC HS6x	glibc	arc64-linux-gnu-gcc

Eclipse IDE Package

Eclipse IDE bundle is also available on a release page. The bundle may contains different components depending on the host platform:

Component	Linux	Windows
Installer	❌	✅
ARCompact/ARCv2 baremetal toolchain (little endian)	✅	✅
ARCompact/ARCv2 baremetal toolchain (big endian)	✅	✅
ARCv2 Linux uClibc toolchain (little endian)	✅	❌
ARCv2 Linux uClibc toolchain (big endian)	✅	❌
OpenOCD	✅	✅
Eclipse IDE	✅	✅

Linux toolchains are not included in the bundle for Windows because they are not supported by case-insensitive file systems.

Also, there is no an installer for Linux hosts - the bundle may be extracted and used anywhere in a file system. Add <ide>/bin directory to PATH variable to make all toolchain binaries available. Eclipse IDE may be launched by <ide>/eclipse/eclipse binary.

How to Get The Toolchain

There are several ways of getting the toolchain:

1. Download the latest release of the prebuilt toolchain on the release page of main toolchain's repository. Also, Eclipse IDE is available for downloading which is shipped with some of toolchains and OpenOCD.
2. You can build toolchains using Crosstool-NG build system. Follow instructions presented in README.md of main toolchain's repository on GitHub.
3. You can build some of toolchains using scripts from arc-gnu-toolchain repository. These scripts are based on the RISC-V scripts.

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1. Big endian targets are not supported by GNU toolchain for ARCv3. ↩