GNU MCU Eclipse plug-ins v4.1.1-201707111115 released

Posted on July 11, 2017 by Liviu Ionescu.

Version 4.1.1-201707111115 is a major release; thanks to a contribution from SiFive, the project was enhanced with support for RISC-V devices and, to better reflect the multi-platform nature, was rebranded GNU MCU Eclipse.

Important: the public URL for the new v4.x Eclipse update site is (http://gnu-mcu-eclipse.netlify.com/v4-neon-updates/).

Binary files »

New features

• a new build plug-in that allows to create and manage RISC-V projects was added
• the plug-ins are also packed together with the current Eclipse IDE for C/C++ Developers Neon.3 distribution; the binaries are available from GitHub Releases.

• explicit support for --specs=nosys.specs added to both ARM and RISC-V plug-ins
• a new RISC-V only repository was added at http://gnu-mcu-eclipse.netlify.com/riscv-v4-neon-updates/

Addressed bugs

• none

Template changes

• none

Other changes

• the minimum requirements were raised to Eclipse 4.6 Neon.3, with Java 1.8;
• with the addition of the RISC-V build plug-in, common ARM & RISC-V code was re-structured
• the preferences and properties pages to configure paths were moved from C/C++ and Run/Debug under a common MCU page; separate pages for the ARM toolchain, RISC-V toolchain, Windows Build Tools, SEGGER J-Link, OpenOCD, pyOCD are available;
• the mechanism used to configure the debug plug-ins was migrated from Eclipse strings to dynamic variables; macros like ${cross_prefix} are all internal and are no longer present in the Run/Debug -> String Substitution preference page for inadvertent changes;
• the update sites were migrated from SourceForge to Bintray; the new public URL for v4.x is (http://gnu-mcu-eclipse.netlify.com/v4-neon-updates/) and will be automatically redirected to the new server; currently there are no more functional dependencies on SourceForge;

Known problems

• the new plug-ins cannot be installed on older Eclipses; for this, use the latest 3.x version, available from the deprecated update site (http://gnuarmeclipse.sourceforge.net/updates);
• the new plug-ins have IDs prefixed with ilg.gnumcueclipse., while the old IDs were prefixed with ilg.gnuarmeclipse.; being completely different, this allows to install the new plug-ins alongside the old ones, but this should be avoided, and the old plug-ins should be manually uninstalled; preferably a new Eclipse instance should be used.