Replace Keil/ARM tools

There's also a character cell frontend as well at:

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Insight was indeed a separate project in recent years and it's development stalled at gdb 6.8. The website is:

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As you say, the major disadvantage of Insight is that it's tightly bound to the gdb source instead of the more typical communication via a gdb protocol you have with the other GDB frontends. (IIRC, Insight also came with it's own copy of the gdb source).

That makes it unusable with later gdb versions and I switched to using ddd which works ok for my needs.

Simon.

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Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP 
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Simon Clubley
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That looks nice. I sometimes like to use gdb from the command line for speed and convenience - a bit of colour would be pretty. Thanks for the tip.

Reply to
David Brown

Yes, that's it.

That's what I thought. I usually use gdb from command line or emacs, but very occasionally when working on startup code I used to use Insight because it made it simple to watch register and a block of memory change as you single-step through assembly language. Other debuggers provide the same thing, but back then Insight was sort of "built in", so that's what I used.

Definitly.

I've always wanted to try Ada on an embedded system, but never got around to it. About 30 years ago I spent a tiny amount of time working with Ada for a 16-bit Navy CPU, and the dev environment was horrible. It ran on on VAX/VMS, but the Ada environment was completely stand-alone: it didn't even use the host filesystem directly. it had it's own editor and filesystem, and it was miserable.

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Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! The FALAFEL SANDWICH 
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Grant Edwards

Ding, ding, ding: you lose!

Never, never, never, ever use any software (development tools or target source) written by a silicon/chip vendor/designer. They are _all_ incompetent when it comes to software.

I'd be very wary of using anything from ST either...

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Grant Edwards

CrossWorks works well with Rowley's own JTAG but it also supports many of the other "usual suspects" out there, including Segger's J-LINK and the $25 interface plus quite a few that I've never heard of before. An Olimex ARM-USB-JTAG is a little slow but it works fine otherwise; I use one at home when the rest of the kit is on the bench at work.

Reply to
Rich Webb

[ ... ]

I've been using ST supplied libraries like STM32F4xx_StdPeriph_Driver, up to now only in prototypes. At that level, they've worked OK so far. It seemed like a quick way to a running program, OTOH, it's a different level of API to learn above the vital hardware register level, and using it to substitute for knowing the hardware is risky. About the 3rd thing I had to do was write my own function for full-duplex SPI, adapted to the API idiom. That idiom imposes a thin layer of complication all its own.

And it doesn't do one thing I really want it for: parameterizing the choice of resources like UARTS, SPI ports, I2C, and so on. Once these get distributed among different peripheral buses, you may have to change quite a few setup function calls if you change your mind. C++ could probably implement this in some horribly opaque way, but ... that would be C++.

Mel.

P.S. Hardware guys' C code is a whole other area, whither I will not go. I'll just accept their hardware contributions and be happy.

Reply to
Mel Wilson

I compromised with an Olimex one that works for the most part with Crosworks for an NXP device.

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Mike Perkins 
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Mike Perkins

Rowley is terrific. Takes away the guesswork, flattens the learning curve. And it works.

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Tim

I have to agree, it works straight out of the box and you get good support.

However, I was peeved when in Rowley's very early days they promised lifetime updates. Of course it went from version 1.7 to 2.0, and I was told I had died and was no longer eligible for updates, or something like that. Sort of rankled with me.

I then moved to the STM32 devices and there us a wealth of open source support plus libraries. I started with Yagarto but this was made obsolete by GCC-ARM tools.

Coupled with Eclipse, OpenOCD (though reverted back to 0.6.0 due to bugs) I feel I have a pleasant and effective IDE.

One very significant point of using open sourced tools is that you can set all this up on your customer's PC as a mirror of my own system without any issues of dongles or magic codes. Where the customer is also free to make his own mods and changes to his code.

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Mike Perkins 
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Mike Perkins

You are welcome. Be warned however, I've only played with it briefly back from when I was evaluating frontend alternatives to Insight and my notes from that time (I've just re-read them) say I considered it to be too limiting for my requirements.

It appears I stopped the evaluation when I had trouble while trying to debug Ada code. My notes are also silent on the subject of remote target debugging support and whether I could easily switch between various cross-compiled and native gdb builds (as you can with ddd by using a option on the ddd command line).

Simon.

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Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP 
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Simon Clubley

What bugs? Have you tried 0.8.0 yet? Do you like it?

(I'm using 0.7.0, and it's working well for me).

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Tim Wescott 
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Tim Wescott

I'm currently playing with USB / ULPI / FPGA at the moment. I haven't had a chance to look at 0.8.0. Is it very different? Just that to the uninitiated, OpenOCD is either something that does work, or just doesn't; without any explanation why!!

I can't recall precisely the problems with 0.7.0 but loading and reset gave unpredictable results.

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Mike Perkins 
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Mike Perkins

I haven't used 0.8.0 yet. I have it on a machine, but haven't used it.

I can't even remember what the changes were -- I was just curious if your problems continued on 0.8.0.

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Tim Wescott

The slightly weird thing about that is that IIRC ARM contracted CodeSourcery to provide a free toolchain, but in order to not upset other compiler vendors, it could not include hardfp support.

ARM engineers have been feeding some of the optimizations back into Newlib. Newlib has I think always had integer-only versions of the formatted input and output functions (iprintf and friends), but they still have a pretty large footprint.

-a

Reply to
Anders.Montonen

That's OK. Since there are only 2 commercial compilers for ARM that I know of, and they are both pretty good AFAIK that title should work well for that.

So, from what I am hearing, nobody has done a comparison of a large-ish project that we can hear about here.

boB

Reply to
boB

Looking back at the above, "unsupported" is wrong; forum support can be adequate especially when the authors participate as in this case. And it is gcc; the answer to any question I have had is a google search away in any case.

Oh really? I did not know that. It is just an edit to a config file anyway, when building from source ("multilibs"). This sort of nonsense is annoying. I expect it is the reason the ST gcc code examples only build with someones proprietary packaging of gcc. Instead of a Makefile, say.

I think you use linker flags to choose a cut-down printf. Not sure of the details, I use my own "formatted output" functions myself.

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John Devereux
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John Devereux

For "big name" commercial ARM compilers, there is ARM/Keil (though it will be replaced by llvm), IAR, Green Hills, CodeWarrior (though gcc is the default now). There are also "small" commercial compilers such as ImageCraft. I don't have a complete list, but that's 5 independent commercial compilers for ARM that I know of.

I can't give any indication of their quality for code generation or as tools in general (even if it was allowed by their licenses!) - I simply haven't used them.

Correct. If you are planning a big project for which these tools are a possible choice, it should not be hard to get evaluation versions - but expect to spend quite a bit of your time if you want to get a fair test.

Reply to
David Brown

I get very confused on which JTAGs/debugger interfaces OpenOCD will work with. E.g., how about the following (some of my immediate work and/or possibilities):

  1. TI Tiva tm4c1294ncpdt
  2. Freescale Coldfire MCF52235
  3. Freescale Ketis K6x
  4. TI Sitara AM335x

???

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Randy Yates 
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Randy Yates

Kinetis

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Randy Yates 
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Randy Yates

Actually, let me ask a very naive question: Can one even use a debugger with a largish process/OS like the AM335x/linux? I mean, what happens if you break in some time-critical portion of the linux kernel?

--RY

Randy Yates writes:

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