Texas Instruments Technology for Innovators(tm)

XDCtools 3.30.04.52 GA Release Notes

July 29, 2014

Contents


Introduction

RTSC / XDC (eXpanDed C) is a standard for reusable software components, optimized for real-time embedded systems. RTSC components have hardware-neutral formal interfaces, are configurable offline to optimize memory and performance, and support custom automation in the development environment via a scripting language.

The XDCtools product includes the following components:

XDCtools releases prior to release 3.30 also included the following components:

For more information about where these components are now available, see the Upgrade & Compatibility Information section below.

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Licensing

Almost all of XDCtools is released under either EPL v1.0 or dual-licensed under EPL or EDL v1.0. However, there are also a number of third-party components included which are made available under a number of other open-source licenses. A complete manifest along with export control information is detailed here.

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Documentation

The product documentation for this release is available in two formats:

Both formats are delivered with the product in the docs subdirectory. The most up-to-date docs can also be viewed in the RTSC-pedia.

Release notes from previous product releases are available in the relnotes_archive directory.

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What's New

This release contains a number of enhancements to support the Grace 3.x product. In addition, the following bugs were resolved in this release.


ID Severity Headline
437301 major xdc.cfg package.xs validate function should be implemented differently for GCC
437222 major c2800/initF2837x's initFlash() function needs to flush the pipeline before returning
439931 normal updates xdc.tools.closure to support IAR toolchain
436631 normal closure "Cannot read property "length" from null" error
301988 normal closure tool: file paths in generated linker.cmd file need to be preceded by -l
390877 minor Closure tool should produce deterministic output

To see a complete list of issues fixed in this release, click here.

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Upgrade and Compatibility Information

Code Composer Studio (CCS)

XDCtools 3.30 should only be used in CCS 6.x (or above). Installation into CCS 5.5 (or earlier) will necessitate a re-installation of CCS 5.5.

XDCtools 3.30 releases are no longer released in an installer, they are simply provided as .zip files which can be extracted into any directory that CCS uses to discover new products (e.g., c:/ti).

Note for Windows users: When you unzip an XDCtools release using Windows Explorer simply double click on the .zip file and drag the single top-level folder it contains to the folder containing ccsv6/ (typically c:/ti). If, instead, you right-click the .zip file and select "Extract All ...", Windows Explorer adds the name of the zip file itself to the default output folder. Do not use this output name. You must extract the contents of the zip file into, say, c:/ti, not a new folder named after the zip file itself.

Deleted Content

Beginning with the 3.30 release, all embedded targets and platforms have been removed from the default release (a.k.a. the "Core" release) so they can be delivered with middleware products, such as TI-RTOS and Grace, that have dependencies only on specific targets and platforms. This has the advantage of greatly reducing the size of XDtools for users who are only interested in a relatively small number of embedded architectures. But, it also breaks compatibility for users who expect to always have their favorite architecture's support included in XDCtools releases.

To simplify the migration to this new distribution and to support size reduced installations, XDCtools 3.30 is available in several different release bundles:

Target Runtime APIs

The xdc.runtime package: As part of the effort to enable xdc.runtime to more easily fit into the ROM of most devices (Bug 424399), several significant optimizations had to be made made that break strict binary compatibility with target content libraries built with XDCtools 3.25.x (or earlier). In particular, target content built against XDCtools 3.25.x xdc.runtime can be

Deprecated types: To reduce conflicts with target content produced by other groups, the deprecated types Uns, Uint, Uint16, etc. are no longer defined by default. If you still need to use these types, you must now define the symbol xdc__deprecated_types when compiling sources that reference these types. See Bug 425917 for details.

Package Compatibility

Package internal files: All generated package internal files are backwards compatible starting from XDCtools 3.20. So, packages created using XDCtools 3.20 or later can be consumed using this release. Because of the addition of the target type CString to XDCtools 3.25.x, packages created with this release that contain non-metaonly modules cannot be used with XDCtools releases earlier than XDCtools 3.25.x. This includes the xdc.runtime package. See XDCtools Internal Version Numbers for additional details.

Package-specific APIs: Each package has a compatibility key defined in its package.xdc specification file. No package compatibility keys were changed in this release.

Please note that the package compatibility keys are independent of XDCtools product release numbers (described in Versioning below). Package compatibility keys:

  1. Enable tooling to identify incompatibilities between components, and
  2. Convey end-user requirements when re-integrating specific components.

Package compatibility keys are composed of 4 comma-delimited numbers - M, S, R, P - where:

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Host Support

This release supports the following hosts:

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Dependencies

With the exception of a C compiler, XDCtools is a fully self-contained set of development tools to create, build, run, and monitor embedded target content. If you use any of the tool sets listed below, you should use the version named in order to successfully use this version of XDCtools:

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Device Support

Starting with release 3.30, each release of XDCtools is available in one of several distribution bundles each supporting a varying number of device families. This allows products (such as CCS) to selectively embed a distribution that is as small as possible.

The "Core" distribution (identified by the "_core" qualifier in installation directory name) has no embedded device support. As a result, "Core" users must either use another product (such as TI-RTOS 2.0) which includes any necessary device support or explicitly add a repository containing the desired device support to the package path of their projects.

The "full" distribution (identified by the lack of any qualifier in the installation directory name) supports the following device families:

The complete list of targets tested by this release can be found here.

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Validation Information

This release was built and validated using Code Composer Studio version 6.0.

The targets supported by this release and the versions of the compilers used to validate them are listed here.

Go to the Known Issues section of these release notes to see any issues with the supported targets that were found during the validation of this release.

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Known Issues

To see a complete list of open XDCtools issues, go to the Eclipse RTSC project's Bugzilla database.

The following table highlights known issues of particular importance.

ID Headline
--- ---

To file a new bug in this database, click here.

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Versioning

All releases have 4 digits (M.mm.pp.bb). This includes GA and pre-releases (engineering, release candidates, etc.). Pre-releases are denoted with a suffix (e.g. 3.15.01.51-eng) and should not be used in a production environment.

This product's version follows a version format, M.mm.pp.bb, where M is a single digit Major number, mm is 2 digit minor number, pp is a 2 digit patch number, and b is an unrestricted set of digits used as an incrementing build counter.

To support multiple side-by-side installations of the product, the product version is encoded in the top level directory, ex. xdctools_3_15_00_50.

Subsequent releases of patch upgrades will be identified by the patch number, ex. XDCtools 3.15.01.67 with directory xdctools_3_15_01_67. Typically, these patches only include bug fixes.

Please note that version numbers and compatibility keys are NOT the same. For an explanation of compatibility keys, please refer to the 'Upgrade and Compatibility Information' section.

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Technical Support and Product Updates

Support questions on the product should be posted to the Eclipse RTSC project's newsgroup. Check the XDCtools download site for the latest releases.

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Last updated: July 29, 2014 Build Ver: 3.30.04.52 Rev: t52