GDB setup — pyOCD (original) (raw)

Most users will want to set up the GNU GDB debugger in order to use pyOCD for debugging applications. Either the command-line GDB or a full IDE can be used.

Standalone GDB server

After you install pyOCD via pip or setup.py, you will be able to execute the following in order to start a GDB server powered by pyOCD:

You can get additional help by running pyocd gdbserver --help.

Example command line GDB session showing how to connect to a running pyocd gdbserver and load firmware:

$ arm-none-eabi-gdb application.elf

<gdb> target remote localhost:3333
<gdb> load
<gdb> monitor reset

The pyocd gdbserver subcommand is also usable as a drop in place replacement for OpenOCD in existing setups. The primary difference is the set of gdb monitor commands.

The recommended toolchain for embedded Arm Cortex-M development is GNU Arm Embedded (GNU-RM), provided by Arm. GDB is included with this toolchain.

Note that the version of GDB included with the new, combined Arm GNU Toolchain as of version 11.2-2022.02_will not_ work with pyOCD. This is because it is currently built without the required support for the XML target descriptions that pyOCD sends to GDB. Versions later than 11.2-2022.02 may have this bug fixed.

For Visual Studio Code, thecortex-debug plugin is available that supports pyOCD.

The GDB server also works well with Eclipse Embedded CDT, previously known as GNU MCU/ARM Eclipse. It fully supports pyOCD with an included pyOCD debugging plugin.

To view peripheral register values either the built-in Eclipse Embedded CDT register view can be used, or the Embedded System Register Viewer plugin can be installed. The latter can be installed from inside Eclipse adding http://embsysregview.sourceforge.net/update as a software update server URL under the “Help -> Install New Software…” menu item.