I’m working on a conference paper and presentation, and tonight I had a break-through :-). So how cool is this: Profiling with GNU gprof a bare-metal embedded Cortex-M application (Freescale Kinetis K64F running the Freescale Kinetis SDK) in Eclipse:
Freescale Kinetis Microcontroller Application Profiling
This is Part 4 of a Mini Series. In Part 3, I described the software concepts (see “Tutorial: Adafruit WS2812B NeoPixels with the Freescale FRDM-K64F Board – Part 3: Concepts“). In this post I describe how to set-up the timer to trigger later DMA operations. The goal is to drive Adafruit’s NeoPixel (WS2812B) with the Freescale FRDM-K64F board:
NeoPixels with FRDM-K64F
This is Part 2 of a Mini Series. In Part 1, I described how to set up the hardware (see “Tutorial: Adafruit WS2812B NeoPixels with the Freescale FRDM-K64F Board – Part 1: Hardware“). Now it is time to have the software tools ready. In this post I describe to have the IDE (Freescale Kinetis Design Studio) with the Freescale SDK installed, along with the correct firmware on the FRDM-K64F Board. The goal is to drive Adafruit’s NeoPixel (WS2812B) with the Freescale FRDM-K64F board:
Freescale FRDM-K64F with NeoPixels
The Kinetis Design Studio v3.0.0 comes with the GNU/GCC ARM Embedded (launchpad) version 4.8-2014-q3. End of June 2015, ARM released a new version, the 4.9-2015-q1.So why not using that newer release?
Release GCC ARM Embedded 4.9 update 2
Is that already enough to make that switch?
I have used semihosting more and more in my projects. However, there are several disadvantage of using it:
The good news is that Segger supports with their debug probes a faster approach with what they name Real Time Terminal (RTT). And it even runs without a debugger attached to the board: all what I need is a Segger J-Link probe (or Segger J-Link OpenSDA) plus a telnet client.
Segger RTT Viewer
Freescale Kinetis Design Studio V3.0.0 came out early May this year. One of the new cool features is that it includes the Processor Expert V3.0.0 with an extended New Project Wizard. With this wizard I’m able to create and use Processor Expert projects with IAR Embedded Workbench and Keil MDK :-).
Kinetis Design Studio, Keil MDK and IAR Embedded Workbench
So here is a problem I have observed for a while, and several users have reported that to me: the problem is that for some reasons and only for some projects, when I do a ‘build’ in Eclipse CDT, it does a ‘full’ build. It does not only build the changed files, it builds all or many files in the project.
Building
I expect that only the changed files will be rebuild. Instead, it compiles many files it should not compile/build, with the result that a build takes a very long time. That’s clearly wrong, and not what I expect. So what is causing this problem?
What makes Eclipse great: using open source tools there are a lot of tools and techniques available which usually are only provided for desktop development.
A while back I described how to do code coverage with Eclipse Kepler and the GNU ARM Embedded (launchpad) tools (see “Code Coverage for Embedded Target with Eclipse, gcc and gcov“). With Kinetis Design Studio out, time to do the same with that Eclipse distribution, especially as Freescale is now using the stock GNU ARM Embedded tools too.
Coverage with multiple Files
In case you are running into the following GNU linker error about a missing __end__:
'Building target: MyProject.elf' 'Invoking: Cross ARM C++ Linker' ... toolchain/bin/../lib/gcc/arm-none-eabi/4.8.4/../../../../arm-none-eabi/lib/armv6-m/rdimon-crt0.o: In function `_start': (.text+0xdc): undefined reference to `__end__' collect2.exe: error: ld returned 1 exit status make: *** [MyProject.elf] Error 1
Failed link because missing __end__
The GNU linker complains that rdimon-crt0.o needs the symbol __end__. This symbol marks the end of the user data/RAM section, and is needed by the rdimon library specs which is used with semihosting.
So now I have carefully set up my compiler include paths in Eclipse to tell the GNU compiler where to find my header files:
Include Paths
The question is: how can I apply these settings to another project?
MCU on Eclipse 