Sunday, July 5, 2009

OpenOCD -- a promissing project

Project website:
http://openocd.berlios.de/web/
http://developer.berlios.de/projects/openocd

Mailing list archive
https://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/openocd-development/

Forum
http://forum.sparkfun.com/viewforum.php?f=18

I started to really trying it out (with J-Link) this May. It has really progressed very fast. Before that, it did not work at all with J-Link V3. Now I can use J-Link (V3, V6 and V7) with several targets I have (STM3210E-Eval, TMS470R1A256, ADuC7060 and LPC-2148) under Linux (and Windows). I am still in the process of learning to use OpenOCD but I can see it as a very promissing project.

V0.2 is slated to be released any time now.

In the future, I would like to see a more stable J-Link driver.

On the other front, right now it used libusb 0.1 and libusb-win32 0.1 and synchronous USB I/O. In the future, maybe it can be switched to libusb 1.0 under Linux and Mac OS X and use asynchronous USB I/O to boost the performance.

For FTDI2232x based JTAG debuggers, right now it uses either FTD2XX (proprietory) or libftdi+libusb 0.1. Hopefully the features of libftdi can be improved to match the performance of FTD2xx, especailly under Windows. The situation is rather complicated under Windows due to the fact that libftdi uses libusb-win32 and libusb-win32 does not work under Vista 64 right now. Maybe WinUSB is a better solution (for XP/Vista and later).

4 comments:

Peter Teoh said...

Can I checked with you, elsewhere in your blog u mentioned that OpenOCD support "PICkit 2", correct?

I have "PICkit 3", does OpenOCD support it?

Thanks!!!

Xiaofan said...

I never say that OpenOCD supports PICKit 2. It will not support PICkit 3 either. For OpenOCD supported hardware, please check the OpenOCD documents.

Anonymous said...

Hi,
have you still got your tms470a256.cfg file for OpenOCD around? I have issues halting it as you had. Thanks!

Xiaofan said...

Sorry no. I no longer have access to the board. Please ask in the OpenOCD-devel mailing list. Thanks.