This chapter describes the use of the Sourcery CodeBench Debug Sprite for remote debugging. The Sprite allows you to debug programs running on a bare board without an operating system. This chapter includes information about the debugging devices and boards supported by the Sprite for MIPS ELF.
Table of Contents
Sourcery CodeBench Lite contains the
Sourcery CodeBench Debug Sprite for MIPS ELF.
This Sprite is provided to allow debugging of programs running on a
bare board. You can use the Sprite to
debug a program when there is no operating system on the board, or
for debugging the operating system itself. If the board is running an
operating system, and you wish to debug a program running on that
OS, you should use the facilities provided by the OS itself (for
instance, using gdbserver
).
The Sprite acts as an interface between GDB and external debug devices and libraries. Refer to Section 6.3, “Invoking Sourcery CodeBench Debug Sprite” for information about the specific devices supported by this version of Sourcery CodeBench Lite.
The Sourcery CodeBench Debug Sprite is not part of the GNU Debugger and is not free or open-source software. You may use the Sourcery CodeBench Debug Sprite only with the GNU Debugger. You may not distribute the Sourcery CodeBench Debug Sprite to any third party.
Before running the Sourcery CodeBench Debug Sprite for the first time, or when
attaching new debug devices to your host system, it is helpful to
verify that the Sourcery CodeBench Debug Sprite recognizes your debug
hardware. From the command line, invoke the Sprite with the
-i
option:
> mips-sde-elf-sprite -i
This prints out a list of supported device types. For devices that can be autodetected, it additionally probes for and prints out a list of attached devices. For instance:
Sourcery CodeBench Debug Sprite for MIPS (Sourcery CodeBench Lite 2013.05-65) mdi: [lib=<file>&cfg=<file>&rst=<n>] MDI device mdi:///23/1 - 24KE (Instruction)/24KE LE mdi:///23/2 - 24KE (Instruction)/24KE BE mdi:///24/1 - 24KE (Cycle)/24KE LE mdi:///24/2 - 24KE (Cycle)/24KE BE mdi:///$Target/$Device - Generic MDI target/device
This shows that MDI (Microprocessor Debug Interface) devices are supported. Four MIPSsim devices have been autodetected. Note that additional configuration steps for the MDI library are required to allow the Sprite to autodetect devices; see Section 6.5, “MDI Devices”.