Re: Power PC Application

[Brendan Simon <bsimon at ctam dot com dot au>]

James Ingham wrote:

> Brendan,
>
>  > The Wiggler is only useable on MS-Windows systems.  I don't know of any
>  > wiggler drivers for any other OS which is quite annoying; but that's life
>  > I guess.  I did a Canadian cross-compile of  Insight the was targeted for
>  > powerpc-eabi and hosted on a MS-Windows machine using the Cygwin
>  > environment.  It seem to run but it did crash or play up quite often.
>
> Was there anything in particular that seemed to give it trouble, or
> was it just general instability?

It was a while ago now but I think it was a bit of both.  I particularly
remember trying to set breakpoints and it seemed that the code would execute
without ever stopping at the breakpoints.
I've just had a quick revisit and played with it using the simulator target.
I'm impressed again :)  It didn't playup and it broke at every breakpoint.
I noticed that I too had link errors for crt0 so I used -msim.  This implies
that my other tests on our hardware was using the -mads option which may have
been the cause of the problems I was seeing.  Alternatively, I do have access
to a Motorola ADS board and I may have tried with that piece of hardware but it
is so long ago now that I can't quite remember.


>  > This was the very first release of Insight so I put it down to it's
>  > imaturity.  Apart from being buggy, the GUI was not settup for remote
>  > downloads to embedded systems.
>
> This is not entirely true.  Insight is not currently set up for use with
> the wiggler target.  It IS set up to do normal gdb remote protocol
> stuff.  It is also setup to do some other kinds of DLL based remote
> debugging.
>
> It would be pretty straight-forward to add support for the BDM to
> Insight, and I will be happy to help anyone who wants to do so get
> started.

That would be very cool.  There are quite a few people using BDM for Motorola
processors.  This would also be good the these embedded systems running eCos.
I tried using the BDM with a Linux port to the MPC860 but it died.  The gurus
on the powerpc-linux mailing list said it is impossible to use the BDM with
Linux due to its virtual memory management etc.

Brendan.