Miosix Toolchain

Information on the Miosix Toolchain

The Miosix Toolchain is a patched version of the GCC compiler, Newlib C library, and libstdc++ library. The patches to the compiler and standard libraries are required to:

• Provide thread safety. Cooperation between the compiler and kernel is needed to make certain C/C++ standard library functions and certain C++ language constructs thread safe. For example throwing C++ exception, constructors of static objects, accessing the same FILE * handle from more threads. This cannot be done by the kernel alone and is the primary motivation for the patches.
• Improved speed of the pthread and C++11 thread APIs. For example, by modifying Newlib so that pthread_mutex_t is not a generic opaque pointer but the real struct containing the mutex implementation, a 7x speedup can be achieved for mutexes.
• Code size and RAM requirement reductions, such as reducing the size of large buffers found in the C stdio library.

Some of the patches have been contributed upstream, but to date compiling Miosix still requires patches. Patches are updated from time to time, and users are required to upgrade to the latest version of the compiler when necessary. The build system will warn you when it's time to upgrade the compiler.

Latest version of the Miosix Toolchain

Released August 12th, 2020. This version:

• upgrades GCC to 9.2.0
• supports the C++11 thread API in Miosix (before only the POSIX one was supported)
• supports C++14
• reduces code size of printf-related functions
• provides many improvements and bug fixes to Miosix userspace processes
• provides more comprehensive atomic operation support through GCC's libatomic

_MIOSIX_GCC_PATCH_MAJOR is set to 3, and _MIOSIX_GCC_PATCH_MINOR is set to 1 in this release.

You can download it here

• Miosix Toolchain Linux (sha1sum 061ec4bb98a83c5529f9fb1a7aea650838fcf94f) This is self-installing shell script, run it with

sh MiosixToolchainInstaller.run

• Miosix Toolchain Windows (sha1sum c6617a9ebd2f97f937aa99e24b56ac7fa9eb6d27) This is a self-installing .exe

Updated July 5th, 2023 (fix GDB breakpoints not working due to missing expat). Contributed by Daniele Cattaneo.

• Miosix Toolchain Mac OS (sha1sum 3a2c38b1bc1ebacb3f01f12e7d4426b8958bd468)

Updated February 9th, 2023 (fix GDB not working). Contributed by Daniele Cattaneo, it is a release build of the Miosix toolchain for Mac OS (Intel).

Installers will automatically detect a previous version of the compiler and uninstall it.

Previous version of the Miosix Toolchain

Released June 8th, 2014. This version provides GCC 4.7.3.

_MIOSIX_GCC_PATCH_VERSION is set to 1 in this release.

No longer supported, if you need it you will have to rebuild this toolchain from sources.