I am a newcomer to Embedded Systems. I have an Atmel AT91EB40A and an EB55. After building GNU toolchain following the procedure described in "Embedded System Design on a Shoestring", I was disappointed to find that GDB does not seem to work too well. Using GDB 5.2/Cygwin 1.3.16, I can download and run a program and set breakpoints. But that is as far as I got. I could not not single step the program. I've tried other combinations of more recent versions of GDB and Cygwin. They were even worse.
target rdi com1 => hang target rdi /dev/ttyS0 => could not open device
I also tried using a Wiggler with ocdremote. Most of the time, it failed to download the program. When it did, it is painfully slow.
Then I tried moving to a Linux machine and repeat the whole thing above. No luck there either. Postings here back in 2003 described similar problems. But there were no answers.
Am I missing something here? Or is it just hopeless and I'll have to spend a few thousand dollars to get a commercial tool? Thanks.