[avr-gcc-list] GDB and avrmon-stk200

[Gopal Santhanam]

Hi, 

I have been trying to setup avrmon-stk200 with gcc & gdb.  Here are some
of my experiences along with a few questions. 

1) Are there any plans to migrate avrmon-stk200 over to the gdb 5.2
infrastructure?  I understand there needs to be some significant changes
to make this happen.  I also see there is a push for development on the
AVaRICE alternative.  However, since AVR JTAG is only available on a few
AVR parts, it would still be very nice to have this low-cost,
quick-and-dirty SPI dongle debugging solution. 


2) I am having some slight problems with the parallel port access.  If I
use uisp, I must rmmod parport_pc and reinstall it before I can use the
host's "mon" program.  Has anyone seen this before?  How is it possible
to reset the parallel port within the mon program?  Also, is there any
way I can easily use "mon" in user mode?  (I presume the only way is
setuid since the program uses the privileged function 'ioperm'.)


3) I tried using the RPM distribution of avr-gcc-3.0.4,
avr-binutils-2.11.2-2, and avr-libc-20020203-4 from the Simulavr
homepage.  Using these tools to cross-compile the AVR code seems to
break the target monitor .  The stepping functionality was totally
hosed.  On the other hand, everything is okay when using gcc-3.0.2,
binutils-2.11.2, and avr-libc-20010821.  Some more investigation
suggests that this is an issue with the libc version!  I find that the
last libc revision that works is avr-libc-20011029


4) When compiling gdb-4.18 with the avr patch, I only linked the opcodes
and bfd directories from the binutils source tree to the gdb source
tree.  I was unable to compile if I linked the include directory as is
stated in http://home.overta.ru/users/denisc/gdb/BUILD.avr-gdb.  As it
stands I see the same backtrace problem as quoted in 

http://avr.jpk.co.nz/pipermail/avr-gcc-list/2001-October/000859.html

and I am unable to disassemble the program through gdb.  Both backtrace
and diassembly work in gdb 5.0 but there are other problems (see next
item). 


5) I figured out part of the register problems with gdb 5.0.  This was
first noted in the following post: 

http://avr.jpk.co.nz/pipermail/avr-gcc-list/2001-October/000860.html

I see that the function monitor_supply_register is pickier in gdb 5.0
than in gdb 4.18.  It wants an '\n' or '\r' after each register in the
register dump.  I made a small fix in avrmon-stk200/host/mon.c to
reflect this.  However, things still aren't totally fixed.  When using
"info registers" in gdb, only a few of the registers are displayed.  GDB
prints the message "*value not available*" for most of the registers. 
Any ideas? 


Regards, 
Gopal 

avr-gcc-list at http://avr1.org