GNU MCU Eclipse plug-ins v4.3.2-201801250917 released

Posted on January 25, 2018 by Liviu Ionescu.

Version 4.3.2-201801250917 is a maintenance release; the main addition is support for semihosting in the SiFive RISC-V project template.

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Semihosting for RISC-V projects

The SiFive RISC-V project template was extended to support semihositing for two purposes:

• as a destination for the trace::printf() infrastructure
• for fully semihosted projects, intended for running unit tests on RISC-V hardware.

To run applications that use semihosting, a recent OpenOCD is required; GNU MCU Eclipse OpenOCD supports semihosting since version v0.10.0-7-20180123.

To activate semihosting in OpenOCD, use:

arm semihosting enable

The Eclipse OpenOCD debug plug-in has a check button in the Startup tab.

To pass command line options to the target application:

arm semihosting_cmdline argv0 argv1 argv2 argv3 ...

In the Eclipse OpenOCD debug plug-in, add the command prefixed with monitor:

New features

• none

Addressed bugs

• none

Template changes

• [Issue:#269] The STM32F7 template did not generate code to set the PLLR register for larger devices, which resulted in an assertion error during runtime; code to initialise PLLR was conditionally added to the initialisation routine.
• [Issue:#268] Support for semihosting trace was added to the SiFive template
• [Issue:#272] For SiFive projects that use semihosing, the arm semihosting option is automatically enabled in the OpenOCD launcher
• [Issue:#273] Support for full semihosting was added to the SiFive template
• [Issue:#274] To slightly optimise the build time, unused device files in the SiFive template are excluded from build
• a J-Link launcher was added to the SiFive template for the projects running on the Arty board; at the time of this release, support for E31ARTY is already available from SEGGER, with support for E51ARTY planned
• the SiFive template was thoroughly tested and proved to build correctly in all possible combinations, so the Experimental label was removed.

Other changes

• none

Known problems

• [2018-01-30] sometime in the previous two versions, while adding support for xPack devices, a bug affecting the CMSIS devices was introduced, and in certain conditions the peripheral viewer shows no content; the bug was fixed in the pre-release v4.3.3; to try it, Install New Software… from the test update URL (http://gnu-mcu-eclipse.netlify.com/v4-neon-updates-test).