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Hi,
Is segger RTT tracing support and SWO tracing is planned to be added to Visual GDB in future for ARM?
Segger RTT is just a simple telnet client. AFAIK openocd doesn’t support SWO but J-Link one supports it.
https://www.segger.com/products/debug-probes/j-link/technology/about-real-time-transfer/
Hi,
VisualGDB actually provides its own mechanism for fast tracing – the advanced semihosting framework. You can reference it via VisualGDB Project Properties -> Embedded Frameworks and then use the regular printf()-like functions to output data. See this tutorial for a detailed example.
If you would like to specifically use SWO, you can configure it manually as shown here (use VisualGDB Project Properties -> Additional GDB Commands) and then use VisualGDB’s raw terminal to connect to the port where J-Link outputs the SWO data.
As the VisualGDB semihosting/profiling framework provides similar functionality to RTT, and is not limited to specific debug probes, we do not have any plans of replacing it with RTT. On the contrary, we have plans of extending it to support more fine-grain tracing functionality.
Ok, got it. I was thinking about existing projects, especially hard-realtime designs, on which it is not possible to replace the debug framework – any semihosting is way more intrusive and orders of magnitude slower. But yes, that’s probably something in charge of Segger as a plugin for VS (not VSCode, that already supports it).
Talking about Segger’s jlink, however, I am experimenting an apparently weird behavior of the Quick Debug setup. In order to debug an existing CMake project, I have to check “The debugged device is not listed. Configure the debug method manually.” and specify all the debug connection details for J-link. If instead I select the device (MXIMRT1061xxxxA) from the list, then “Debug using:” shows “No compatible USB device found” – although the package Segger J-Link 5.9 is installed. Is this by design?
Both Segger RTT and the fast semihosting framework rely on the same underlying principles (ring buffer in the target memory accessed without stopping the CPU), so there should not be any noticeable performance difference between them, as long as you are using the optimized release build. The bottleneck in both cases would be the JTAG/SWD bandwidth when doing background memory reads.
Regarding Quick Debug, according to our records, you are using the VisualGDB Embedded Edition that does not support Quick Debug. In order to use Quick Debug, please upgrade your key to the Custom edition or higher here: https://sysprogs.com/splm/mykey.
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