Category Archives: Debugging

Breakpoints with Special Effects

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As promised back in Percepio, I want to have it ported and working with the Freescale Cortex-M4/Kinetis in CodeWarrior. That’s what I’m working on now, deep into the night. While doing this, I had to generate a lot of trace data, and I used the script I presented in that earlier post: Setting a breakpoint in the trace buffer wrapper event and then export the data. But there has to be an even better way, and indeed there is one: Breakpoints with Special Effects!

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Debugging Global Variables

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If I’m debugging my application in Eclipse or CodeWarrior, it shows in the Variables view the local and global variables of the current Thread and stack frame only:

Debug View with Variables View

Debug View with Variables View

This makes sense as this is usually where my focus is. And this is good from a performance point of view: The debugger does not need to read a lot of other variables from the target which I’m not interested in. But the question is: how to show the variables which are in other files if I really need to look at them?

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Percepio FreeRTOS+Trace V2.2.2 released

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Percepio has released a new V2.2.2 library of FreeRTOS+Trace (see Tracing with FreeRTOS+Trace from Percepio). The new release comes with many improvements. The trace recording is optimized for more efficient recording and longer trace with the same amount of memory.

Note: Because the trace data structure is changed and optimized, I need the latest tool on the PC/host from http://www.percepio.com.

I have updated the Percepio Processor Expert component to generate and use the new trace library V2.2.2. This includes the new settings in the component properties as shown below:
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Killing Me Softly: Zombies and Debugger Engines

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I’m stressing the CodeWarrior debugger a lot: having multiple boards attached, debugging things in parallel, switching and unplugging boards all the time. I have my eclipse IDE running for several days and nights (up to a week or more), with constantly suspending and resuming and switching networks. And sometimes it is my fault (see Device is Secure?). But well, sometimes the CodeWarrior debugger has a problem too. Luckily, a simple trick gets things back on track.

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Device is secure?

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It is one of these long weekends which allow to catch up on many things. One thing I finally completed was the move to FreeRTOS V7.1.1. With this I did some tests using the Tower boards, including the Kinetis one. So I have rebuild my Kinetis K60 application and was ready to flash the device. But then to my surprise I got this dialog:

Device is secure. Erase to unsecure?

Device is secure. Erase to unsecure?

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Dump my Device Memory

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Maybe this situation is familiar to you: My embedded software stopped in the field. I am in front of it, hooked up with my laptop and debugger. And I see: indeed, it has a problem. Maybe just a one-time-thing? Maybe I do a reset and things will work as expected? Not really, according to Debugging Rules.

The thing is this: I’m in a situation which requires some deep investigation. But I do not have the time now. Or my boss, the boss-boss or the customer are standing behind me asking all the good questions for which I don’t have an answer. So in this situation it would be great if you could take a dump of the device memory, reset that board, move on and investigate what happened offline? Here are several ways how to do this…

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Flashing with a Button (and a Magic Wand)

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In eclipse and CodeWarrior for MCU10 the usual thing I do is:

  1. I have a project in my eclipse workspace
  2. I compile and build it
  3. I download and flash it to the target for debugging

If I need to program another board with the same binary, then I download it to that board too. Fine. But what if I want to skip point 1 and 2? What if I do not have or want a project? All what I have (and need) is a binary file, and I want is to flash that file to my boar. By pressing a button.

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Watchpoints: Data Breakpoints

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Sometimes my embedded application is not doing what I want it to do. I can solve many problems with normal ‘step/stop mode debugging‘: setting breakpoints, step, stop, inspect data, and so on. But not always. If a piece of code is changing a global variable unintentionally, I do not know where to set my breakpoint. Something is changing my variable, and I have no clue from where. It could be a dangling pointer, a stack overflow or something similar which I cannot track down with code breakpoints. What I need is a breakpoint on data: watchpoints!

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