Re: Power PC Application

[James Ingham <jingham@cygnus.com>]

Brendan,

 > William Blum wrote:
 > 
 > > We are working on a Motorola MPC860 Power PC project and want to use
 > > Insight as the debug platform.  The target PPC is a 'bare' system.  We
 > > plan to access the target using Macraigor 'Wiggler' or 'Blackbird' On
 > > Chip Debug" (OCD) devices.  We have the PPC cross-toolchain, based on
 > > egcs, in place and functional.  Can you tell us how we can go about
 > > applying Insight for use in such an environment?
 > 
 > The Wiggler is only useable on MS-Windows systems.  I don't know of any
 > wiggler drivers for any other OS which is quite annoying; but that's life
 > I guess.  I did a Canadian cross-compile of  Insight the was targeted for
 > powerpc-eabi and hosted on a MS-Windows machine using the Cygwin
 > environment.  It seem to run but it did crash or play up quite often.

Was there anything in particular that seemed to give it trouble, or
was it just general instability?

 > This was the very first release of Insight so I put it down to it's
 > imaturity.  Apart from being buggy, the GUI was not settup for remote
 > downloads to embedded systems.  

This is not entirely true.  Insight is not currently set up for use with
the wiggler target.  It IS set up to do normal gdb remote protocol
stuff.  It is also setup to do some other kinds of DLL based remote
debugging.  

It would be pretty straight-forward to add support for the BDM to
Insight, and I will be happy to help anyone who wants to do so get
started.

 >                                    The only way to target the wiggler BDM
 > was to go to the gdb command prompt and type the usual setup stuff (eg.
 > "ocd wiggler lpt").  You will need a startup script to initialise the 860
 > registers and memory map etc.  One day I'll get around to looking at
 > Insight again.  We are currently using SDS Single Step on MS-Windows.  I
 > would dearly love to run Insight (preferably on a Linux box).
 > 

Jim