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The OpenOCD error looks like some of the debug plugins got cached incorrectly. Restarting Visual Studio should solve it.
Drag-and-drop between folders should normally work, unless you are trying to move files generated by STM32CubeMX. These files are intentionally non-movable, because re-running STM32CubeMX would re-generate them under old paths, creating conflicts between the new and old versions. If you are 100% sure you will not need to do that, you can create a regular CMake-based project, move the STM32CubeMX-generated code into it, and then most usual editing functionality will work just fine.
Hi,
Thanks for sharing this. Normally, the project reloading should not effect the logic that manages VisualGDB Project Properties, but given the overall complexity of VS, it could have cached something in a way that would interfere with VisualGDB.
If anyone else encounters the problem and confirms the workaround, we can investigate it further and see if VisualGDB can detect it automatically.
Hi,
VisualGDB indeed does not have a separate menu command for creating physical folders. However, it will recognize the actual folders where the sources are located. E.g. you can try clicking Add->New Item, and appending “\subfolder” to the Location field. VisualGDB will automatically create subfolder, will place the new file there, and will show it in Solution Explorer.
We have rechecked the Group Sources by Types setting and it worked just fine – hid the Source files and Header files nodes as expected. Please try checking it on a newly created project without changing any other settings. If it works there, please try comparing the 2 projects to see if there is any other setting you could have changed that triggered this behavior. Please also make sure the project is saved after you change the setting. If you close Visual Studio without saving the solution/project, the setting will not be saved and VisualGDB will revert to the old behaviour next time you open the project.
Hi,
The problem you are describing involves 6 different components:
- The actual board
- The firmware running on the board
- The JTAG debugger
- The OpenOCD tool that talks to the debugger
- The Arduino package that contains rules for building the software
- VisualGDB used as a GUI on top of this
The role of VisualGDB here is to provide convenient GUI for automating common development tasks. E.g. the graphical editor for the KConfigs with convenient search and grouping, automatic editing of CMake files, etc. The underlying components come directly from hardware vendors, Arduino community, etc. They sometimes have bugs, and sometimes have incompatibilities between different versions. We do not charge you anything for using them. We do not require that you buy a JTAG debugger from us, a specific board from us, use only libraries approved by us, etc. Hence, if some of these external components don’t work as intended, it’s generally up to you to figure it out.
We try to be fair: if you can get debugging to work with the same board using the same Arduino package outside VisualGDB, we can help you find VisualGDB settings that will allow replicating the working setup. If it’s not working outside VisualGDB, you would need to find the most similar setup that works (e.g. another board), and iteratively compare the two setups until you find the root cause of the differences. This could be frustrating and time-consuming, but this is the way to go if you encounter problem spanning across many different components.
As for being experts, if we wanted to fully solve this problem, we would need to get the same board, same versions of the packages, reproduce the problem, and then try other combinations of Arduino packages, toolchains, ESP-IDF versions, etc., narrowing down the combination that causes trouble. It would take multiple hours (+ purchasing extra board) and would not result in any improvements to VisualGDB. The conclusion would be that a particular version of ESP-IDF doesn’t work well with a particular version of some library when using some particular combination of settings. And even that finding would be obsoleted when Espressif released another version of their package. If we offered this as a part of our regular support, we would have to raise the product prices several times to the point where very few users would be interested in it. So instead, we limit the included support to VisualGDB-specific issues (we have detailed page explaining it) and can gladly fix virtually anything else at our hourly consulting rate.
Hi,
VisualGDB looks for RTOS-specific symbols (tables of all tasks, etc) in the debugged image. As long as they are present, it automatically loads the RTOS plugin regardless of how the image was built.
Splitting the code into 2 images where RTOS and the actual payload is rather uncommon, so VisualGDB does not support this automatically. You can try using some external tool to merge them back into one ELF file and debug that one, but it could be tricky.
Hi,
Yes, they are only supported on ARM devices with background memory access. RISC-V is slowly becoming more popular, so we may eventually port the real-time analysis frameworks there, but currently they only work with ARM.
That said, Live Watch does not require any special frameworks and will work with any CPUs that support background memory reads.
Hi,
The GNU Make build system is very old, limited in many ways and does not support many advanced features directly. In theory, you should be able to get them working by patching the Makefiles, however we do not have any examples of it and are not planning to add one.
For new projects, please consider using Advanced CMake or MSBuild. Both work much better than plain GNU Make and have better integration on the VisualGDB side as well.
Hi,
It looks like an issue between OpenOCD and a particular board. We do not know what is causing it – both the ESP32 OpenOCD port and the board are provided by Espressif.
Our best advice would be to first get it working via command line (i.e. being able to program FLASH on the same board with OpenOCD manually). When this works, we can help you configure VisualGDB to match the OpenOCD command line that worked.
Hi,
Please refer to this page for a detailed explanation of ESP-IDF integration and troubleshooting tips.
Our OpenOCD forks (including the fork of their fork) contain a couple of minor changes (e.g. commands for low-latency memory reading used by Live Watch and tracing), so we usually just apply those on top of the original sources from either fork, and rebuild everything. Without the sources, this won’t work.
Either way, you can manually just copy the binary from STM32CubeIDE on your side. It should work the same way.
Hi,
Based on what we’ve seen, ST hasn’t published the sources for their latest OpenOCD. We opened an issue on Github for it, but got no reply. You can try contacting them directly – maybe you’ll get better luck.
Hi,
Sure, 2 BSPs with different aliases should work.
If you have trouble locating the properties, please attach an UNCROPPED screenshot of the Visual Studio window showing the Solution Explorer and we will point it out.
Hi,
VisualGDB doesn’t do anything special with Qt. It merely runs gdb via SSH using the command line shown in the GDB session window. If it affects the Qt functionality, it’s something between Qt and GDB and is not a VisualGDB-specific issue, sorry.
Hi,
Unfortunately, it is hard to say anything specific based on the information you provided.
Our best advice would be to try creating a new similar project from scratch and check for any errors along the way. If the new project works and the existing ones do not, you can try comparing the .vcxproj files between them, and temporarily copying the working .vcxproj file into the broken project or vice versa to see if it affects the issue.
Hi,
If debugging works on the host, you can configure VisualGDB to run the gdb on the target. If it still doesn’t work, you can check the gdb log on the VisualGDB side and the gdb log on the Qt Creator side, making sure the commands issued by VisualGDB (e.g. paths used in breakpoints, path to the executable, etc) are the same as the commands issued by Qt Creator.
