Hardware debugging support

Hardware debugging support
	Chapter 310. STM32L4R9-DISCO Platform HAL

Name

SWD support — Usage

Use of JTAG for debugging

JTAG can be used to single-step and debug loaded applications, or even applications resident in ROM.

Debugging of ROM applications is only possible if using hardware breakpoints. The Cortex-M4 core of the STM32L4R9 only supports a limited number of such hardware breakpoints, so they may need to be used sparingly. If using a GDB front-end such as Eclipse, check it has not set unnecessary extra breakpoints such as at main(). Some JTAG devices give the option of whether to set hardware or software breakpoints by default. Be sure to configure your device appropriately.

When debugging via JTAG, you are likely to need to disable the default HAL idle thread action, otherwise there may be issues where the target fails to halt and the debugging session is unreliable. More details can be found in the Cortex-M architectural HAL.

J-Link Support

The preferred debug device for this board is the on-board ST-Link debug interface probe. This also has the benefit fof routing USART2 as a standard USB CDC-ACM terminal.

Initialization scripts that support debugging the board via either the OpenOCD or J-Link GDB servers can be found in the directory packages/hal/cortexm/stm32/stm32l4r9_disco/VERSION/misc relative to the root of your eCos installation.

For JLinkGDBServer, the file stm32l4r9_disco.jlink, provides initialization for the board and should be used in the following command line:

     $ JLinkGDBServer -device STM32L4R9AI -xc stm32l4r9_disco.jlink

Similarly OpenOCD may be invoked with the following command line:

     $ openocd -f openocd.stm32l4r9_disco.cfg

Configuration of JTAG applications

JTAG/SWD applications can be loaded directly into SRAM or flash without requiring a ROM monitor. Loading can be done directly through the JTAG/SWD device, or through GDB where supported by the JTAG/SWD device.

In order to configure the application to support these modes, it is recommended to use the SRAM, ROM or ROMAPP startup types which will implicitly cause two important settings to change. Firstly, CYGSEM_HAL_USE_ROM_MONITOR must be disabled. Secondly the CYGDBG_HAL_DIAG_TO_DEBUG_CHAN option should be enabled in order to prevent HAL diagnostic output being encoded into GDB ($O) packets. These configuration changes could be made by hand, but use of the aformentioned startup types will just work.

With these changes, any diagnostic output will appear out of the configured diagnostic channel, by default USART2 on ST-Link USB CN13. An eCosCentric extension allows diagnostic output to appear on the GDB console, or on the Eclipse console. To enable this feature, you must set the configuration option CYGSEM_HAL_DIAG_TO_GDBFILEIO_CHAN in the common HAL package. If you are using the graphical configuration tool then you should then accept any suggested solutions to the subsequent configuration conflicts. Older eCos releases also required the gdb "set hwdebug on" command to be used to enable GDB or Eclipse console output, but this is no longer required with the latest tools.


Configuration		The HAL Port

2024-03-18

eCosPro License