Debugging support for ARM Cortex-M Microcontrollers with the following features:
- Support J-Link, OpenOCD GDB Server
- Initial support for STMicroelectronic's ST-LINK GDB server (no SWO support yet)
- Partial support for PyOCD and textane/stlink (st-util) GDB Servers (SWO can only be captured via a serial port)
- Initial support for the Black Magic Probe (This has not been as heavily tested; SWO can only be captured via a serial port)
- Cortex Core Register Viewer
- In some cases the st-util GDB server can report incomplete/incorrect registers, so there may be some issues here.
- Peripheral Register Viewer (Defined through standard SVD file)
- SWO Decoding - "console" text output and binary data (signed and unsigned 32-bit integers, Q16.16 fixed point integers, single percision floating point values)
- The registers that are part of the DWT, TPIU, and ITM debug components will automatically be configured and do not need to be set in firmware.
- Firmware may still need to enable the SWO output pin - as this part of the setup is microcontroller dependant.
- Decoding ETM data over the SWO pin is not currently supported.
- Support for Custom ITM Data Decoders:
- Ability to define JavaScript modules to decode complex data formats streamed over one or more ITM ports. Data can be printed to a output window, or sent to the graphing system.
- Live graphing of decoded ITM data.
- Raw Memory Viewer ("Cortex-Debug: View Memory" command)
- Ability to view and step through the disassembled binary. There are three ways that disassembled code will be shown:
- Disassembly code will automatically be shown if it cannot locate the corresponding source code.
- You can manually see the disassembly for a particular function ("Cortex-Debug: View Disassembly (Function)" command)
- You can set the debugger to always show show disassembly ("Cortex-Debug: Set Force Disassembly" command)
- Globals and Static scopes in the variables view
- Initial support for Rust code (most functionality is working; disassembly views and variables view may still have issues)
- RTOS Support (J-Link and OpenOCD - RTOS supported depends on GDB server support)
- As a general rule do not try to use stepping instructions before the scheduler of your RTOS has started - in many cases this tends to crash the GDB servers or leave it in an inconsistent state.
- Additional Graphing Options
- Enhanced SVD Auto-selection
- Semihosting Support
Requirements:
- ARM GCC Toolchain (https://developer.arm.com/open-source/gnu-toolchain/gnu-rm/downloads) - provides arm-none-eabi-gdb and related tools
- At least one of:
- J-Link Software Tools - provides the J-Link GDB Server for J-Link based debuggers (https://www.segger.com/downloads/jlink)
- OpenOCD - provides a GDB Server that can be used with a number of debuggers (http://openocd.org)
- NOTE: On macOS do not use the default version of OpenOCD provided by homebrew, this is not compatible with releases V0.2.4 and newer. You can either install from source using homebrew (
brew install open-ocd --HEAD) or the packages from https://github.com/gnu-mcu-eclipse/openocd/releases will also work. Some linux versions and Windows may also need a more up-to-date version of OpenOCD from the gnu-mcu-eclipse releases.
- NOTE: On macOS do not use the default version of OpenOCD provided by homebrew, this is not compatible with releases V0.2.4 and newer. You can either install from source using homebrew (
- Texane's st-util GDB server - Only supports ST-Link Debug Probes (https://github.com/texane/stlink)
- ST-LINK GDB server - This server is packaged with the STM32CubeIDE which must be installed. The location of the STM32CubeIDE and related tools is automatically resolved but also can be overridden using configuration settings (
armToolchainPath,stm32cubeprogrammerandserverpath). - pyOCD GDB Server - GDB server that supports the CMSIS-DAP debugger on a number of mbed boards (https://github.com/mbedmicro/pyOCD)
- Black Magic Probe
See https://github.com/Marus/cortex-debug/wiki for usage information. This needs some help from the community
Parts of this extension are based upon Jan Jurzitza's (WebFreak) code-debug extension (https://github.com/WebFreak001/code-debug). His project provided an excellent base for GDB MI parsing and interaction.