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Rockbox 4.0 released

[Posted April 2, 2025 by corbet]

For those of you who still have dedicated audio players: version 4.0 of Rockbox, a replacement firmware for many players, has been released. This release brings support for a number of new devices, updated codecs, a number of user-interface improvements, some new games, and more. (LWN last reviewed Rockbox in 2010 — and looked at the ill-fated Android port that year as well).

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A brighter future

Posted Apr 3, 2025 13:46 UTC (Thu) by gevaerts (subscriber, #21521) [Link]

As someone who used to be fairly active in rockbox around fifteen years ago, it's been very gratifying to see development pace pick up again. I doubt it will ever get back to where it was at its peak, but it's definitely no longer almost dead!

Congratulations to the team!

GCC 4.9.4

Posted Apr 3, 2025 20:23 UTC (Thu) by gioele (subscriber, #61675) [Link] (2 responses)

From the changelog:

> Toolchain for all supported devices is now GCC 4.9.4 and can be built using contemporary systems

The embedded world never ceases to amaze.

GCC 4.9.4

Posted Apr 3, 2025 22:43 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

>> Toolchain for all supported devices is now GCC 4.9.4 and can be built using contemporary systems
> The embedded world never ceases to amaze.

That toolchain bump landed in October of 2020[1] and there are _still_ problems popping up that can be traced to back to it.

In the embedded world, you don't change what isn't broken without a damn good reason... and comprehensive testing, which is a bit challenging when the handful of folks involved are all unpaid spare-time volunteers that lack access to a majority of the *83* different devices [2] covered by the release.

Another major bump has been in the works since late 2022 (with fixes and other enhancements trickling in) but there's still at least one major regression (of the "6th generation ipods hang during early init" variety) that needs to be sorted out before that can land.

[1] At the time, there were *six* different toolchains in use, ranging from GCC 4.0.4 to GCC 4.9.4 (and equally importantly, binutils/ld), most of which simply weren't even buildable on contemporary systems. Uplifting everything onto the same toolchain took a *lot* of work -- As well as the usual codegen problems (questionable source code and/or outright mis-compilations) there were also subtle changes in [inline] asm calling conventions, and many cases of severe linker cruelty -- but that effort has paid dividends many times over.
[2] Most of which have been out of production for at least a decade, if not two.

GCC 4.9.4

Posted Apr 4, 2025 9:14 UTC (Fri) by gioele (subscriber, #61675) [Link]

>>> Toolchain for all supported devices is now GCC 4.9.4 and can be built using contemporary systems
>>
>> The embedded world never ceases to amaze.
>
> That toolchain bump landed in October of 2020[1] and there are _still_ problems popping up that can be traced to back to it.
>
> In the embedded world, you don't change what isn't broken without a damn good reason... and comprehensive testing, which is a bit challenging when the handful of folks involved are all unpaid spare-time volunteers that lack access to a majority of the *83* different devices [2] covered by the release.

To be clear, my original comment was a positive one: kudos to the team managing such a transition under all those constraints!

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