Re: Coldfire V2 devices and serial debuggers

At 11:09 PM 2/9/2009, you wrote:
>Has anyone got a serial debugger running on a Coldfire V2 MCF52xxx device?
>
>A while back I read that dBug supports the GDB protocol and dBug is 
>a serial debugger. But all posts I have seen, seem to be about using 
>a BDM based debugger.
>
>The reason a serial debugger is prefered to a BDM based debugger is 
>that I'm doing some robotics work and I can make the servo code run 
>at a higher interrupt level than the serial debugger and this will 
>allow me to debug code with servos running.
>
>BDM is too intrusive and it will cause the servos to go nuts.
>
>The CF debug docs say that BDM theoretically will steal cycles but 
>everything I have read says tha the BDM debuggers halt the CPU...
>
>Thanks in advance.
>Harjit

My experience with the Coldfire BDM debugger is the same as 
yours.  They way I used it, I don't think it ever did cycle 
stealing.  That is probably due to the debugger software and drivers 
rather than an inherent limitation of the BDM interface or hardware.

At one time I got GDB to work over a network connection to a Coldfire 
running RTEMS.  As I recall, you could stop one tread while allowing 
others to run, which was very helpful for troubleshooting some 
problems, but did require the system to start up at least enough to 
get the network going before debugging was possible.  I think that 
Till Straumann provided the original code, possibly as part of cexp 
(which I never used).  You could search the RTEMS mailing list 
archive for more info.

You might also find something useful in the BDM project on 
SourceForge.  I found a comment in an old mailing list post from 
Chris Johns that says, "If you need BDM debugging support the BDM 
project on SF has a remote gdb server in CVS that I am still testing. 
It works with the rtems-4.9 debugger.".  I don't know if it will work 
independently of RTEMS or not.

Steve


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Steve Strobel
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Billings, MT 59101-7378
(406) 245-5002 ext 102
(406) 245-4889 (fax)
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