[ECOS] Help needed: eCos on NEC vr4300 board.

[ECOS] Help needed: eCos on NEC vr4300 board.

[Ling Su]

Hello,

I am trying to set up the environment for debugging NEC VR4373 board.
Unfortunately I met a lot of trouble to make the remote debugging
working..:( Could anyone please help me on following questions,

<1>. I found two files in vr4374 gdbstub directory: .bin and .img, I burned
the .bin into a EEPROM and set the baudrate to 38400, I connect the serial
ports by a direct serial cable. In gdb, when I try to connect to remote
target... It complains three times, "ignore packet error, continuing..." and
at last failed with an error message "Malformed response to offset query.
timeout"... Did I do anything wrong.. Did I burn the correct gdb stub?

<2>. Can I use Ethernet instead of serial port on vr4373?

<3>. Is there a CygMon avaibliable for vr4373?

Thanks a lot! and please help me.

Regards,
-Ling

Re: [ECOS] Help needed: eCos on NEC vr4300 board.

[Jonathan Larmour]

Ling Su wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I am trying to set up the environment for debugging NEC VR4373 board.
> Unfortunately I met a lot of trouble to make the remote debugging
> working..:( Could anyone please help me on following questions,
> 
> <1>. I found two files in vr4374 gdbstub directory: .bin and .img, I burned
> the .bin into a EEPROM and set the baudrate to 38400, I connect the serial
> ports by a direct serial cable. In gdb, when I try to connect to remote
> target... It complains three times, "ignore packet error, continuing..." and
> at last failed with an error message "Malformed response to offset query.
> timeout"... Did I do anything wrong.. Did I burn the correct gdb stub?

Connect using a terminal emulator to check you can see the correct stub
output coming from the board when it is switched on. It should be something
like
++$T

In GDB make sure you have the correct endianness, using "set endian big".
Also use "set mips saved-gpreg-size 32" as the documentation says.

> <2>. Can I use Ethernet instead of serial port on vr4373?

Nope.

> <3>. Is there a CygMon avaibliable for vr4373?

Nope sorry.
 
Jifl
-- 
Red Hat, 35 Cambridge Place, Cambridge, UK. CB2 1NS  Tel: +44 (1223) 728762
"Plan to be spontaneous tomorrow."  ||  These opinions are all my own fault

Re: [ECOS] Help needed: eCos on NEC vr4300 board.

[Jonathan Larmour]

Jonathan Larmour wrote:
> 
> Connect using a terminal emulator to check you can see the correct stub
> output coming from the board when it is switched on. It should be something
> like
> ++$T

Oops, I didn't finish this. It should be something like:

++$T5thread:00000000;25:0000000080003a50;1d:00000000800068d8;#12

Jifl
-- 
Red Hat, 35 Cambridge Place, Cambridge, UK. CB2 1NS  Tel: +44 (1223) 728762
"Plan to be spontaneous tomorrow."  ||  These opinions are all my own fault

Re: [ECOS] Help needed: eCos on NEC vr4300 board.

[Jonathan Larmour]

[ Please remember to CC the ecos-discuss list, I can't always give personal
replies, and at least if its on the list, someone else has a chance ]

Ling Su wrote:
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> I tried using HyperTerminal in WinNT, I didn't get any output from the
> gdbstub. I will try to figure out if there is anything wrong with my own
> operation. In the meantime, could you please answer me some following dump
> questions, thanks a lot.
> 
> <1>. I should burn the 'stubrom.bin' instead of 'stubrom.img', is that
> correct?

Yes.

> <2>. There are two serial port on the board J1 and J2, I connected to J1, is
> that correct?

Yes.
 
> <3>. NEC provide me a PMON and it works fine, can I use it to download ecos
> program? It work in 9600 bitrate instead of 38400, and could the gdbstub.bin
> works in 9600B?

Yes - when configuring eCos for your application, there is a HAL
configuration option to choose ROM monitors. Choose PMON there.

To allow the program to be debugged in GDB, you would probably also need to
include GDB stubs in your application (this configuration option is under
the HAL debugging section). I haven't tried to see how this works with PMON
though.
 
> <4>. Everytime when I use the PMON by NEC, I must reset several times and
> wait for a while to see the light on board blinking, this is the way to make
> sure the PMON is running, how could I check this with the gbdstub.bin to
> make sure it is running?

Sorry but the GDB stub has no equivalent other than to attach something to
the serial port and look for output. If there was no output, perhaps the
ROM was not programmed correctly, in which case, perhaps it is an issue
with the ROM programmer? Perhaps your programmer needs to be told to
byteswap the ROM - this sometimes happens.

For what it's worth, we have verified that the prebuilt stubrom.bin file
does definitely work with our boards here.

> I'd like to check if the NEC board support 38400 UART, but I did get a
> VR4373 from NEC, why not it is so difficult to work. Sorry for the bothering
> and appreciate your answer very much.

We use the DDB-VRC4373 board here. If yours is the same, then I'm sure it
should support 38400.

Jifl
-- 
Red Hat, 35 Cambridge Place, Cambridge, UK. CB2 1NS  Tel: +44 (1223) 728762
"Plan to be spontaneous tomorrow."  ||  These opinions are all my own fault