I've been diffing aobut in the latest GDB sources and it looks pretty
complex. It's all written in C, which I find a bit of a pain to read. My
day job is a C++ programmer :)

I think what I'll do is work on the PIC code and implement GDB's remote
protocol. If I can read & write memory and maybe set break points, even
if it means using hyper terminal, then I'll be happy. I'm still learning
PIC assembler so it's a nice little project.

Cheers
Mark

On Sat, 26 Oct 2002, Mark Burton wrote:

> With the ability to read & write to program memory and manipulate the
> stack the 18F is powerful enough to support the GDB protocol.
>
> I shall carry on working on it and see how it goes. Will post results
> to this list.

Having written a debugger, let me admonish you to not to underestimate
the amount of work! I looked at gdb early on but discounted it for a
couple of practical reasons. First, I had user experience at the time
with the Dragonball port for the Palm Pilot. What I noticed at the time
was that the version of gdb upon which the Dragonball port was based was
far behind that of the latest version of gdb. For reasons that were not
clear to me, the Dragonball was not part of the main gdb distro at the
time. Consequently, bug fixes and enhancements to gdb did not make it
into the DragonBall port. Now I'm working with ARM7 devices and I'm
finding the same thing true. (ARM7 - or more specifically, the arm-elf
tool chain only works [reliably] with gcc-2.95.2, binutils-2.10, and
gdb??? - all of which are getting dated).

The other thing that I personally wanted out of a debugger was not
provided by gdb. For example, I wanted to be able to set breaks on
memory accesses, connect devices to I/O pins, etc. More recently, I
discovered SID. Had SID existed 4 years ago, I probably would have
developed a PIC core for it instead writing a debugger from scratch.

But don't let me sound too pessimistic. If you really want to get the
18F series working with gdb, then you can freely use what you need from
gpsim to make the simulator portion (gpsim is GPL'd). But, in addition
to gdb, you're going to need to develop an assembler. And while you're
at it, you might as well port to gcc too :).

You may want to move this discussion to the GNUPIC mailing list where we
discuss this kind of stuff occasionally.

Scott

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