Freedom tools built for Ubuntu14 and CentOS 6

Archive RISC-V
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The freedom tools binaries are built for the Ubuntu 14 and CentOS 6 distributions:

If I wouldn’t want to build a toolchain just to build the toolchain, then I would use only available packages and ubuntu can be upgraded to gcc9 very quickly, while centos has limited options in upgrading gcc. Together with the glibc differences 2.12 vs 2.19. I would guess that the ubuntu variant is the recommended variant for most users while the centos is the fall-back compatibility variant where the ubuntu14 binaries will not work?

But don’t know if my assumption is correct, what is the reasoning for shipping binaries for these two distributions?

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Your assumptions are mostly correct.

We have a number of corporate customers who operate in a RHEL6 environment and so must ensure that they have access to a working toolchain.

1 Like
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Good question.

Are there any (reasonably recent) known Linux distributions which do not run the CentOS 6 binaries, and need the Ubuntu 14 binaries?

I expected the old CentOS 6 binaries to be enough, but I might be wrong.

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I expected the old CentOS 6 binaries to be enough, but I might be wrong.

We use Ubuntu 16.04 internally, so it is low effort to support the build.

Also, we were missing python scripting support in GDB for the CentOS6 build, so technically there is a small difference between the 2 builds. However, we are looking into adding python scripting support to the CentOS6 builds, so this difference may be going away soon.

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Right, building GDB with Python support is problematic on CentOS 6.

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Thank you very much @DrewatSiFive for a very fast explanation.