The Research And Implementation Of A Cross-Platform ARM Debugging System Based On CoreSight Interface

With the development of embedded system and the ARM MCU family, the embedded design and application based on ARM MCU become more and more popular in the modern industry area. The debugging system for both hardware and software plays an important role in the whole process of embedded system development, and it can help the engineers to largely shorten the development cycle of the whole system if it is powerful and efficient enough. However, due to the intellectual property and commercial interests conflict between different ARM MCU manufacturers, their commercial debugging systems are very expensive and not open-source, and the protocols between debugging software and hardware are not compatible to each other, which means it lacks a general standard for the debugging system of the MCU based on ARM architecture. Simultaneously, because of the small number of the ARM MCU manufacturers in China, the researches on the debugging system for the ARM MCU are still at the beginning stage, and especially for the one on the system for the new ARM architecture:Cortex, so there are almost no domestic efforts on this. It is quite meaningful and important for this paper to design a new debugging system for ARM MCU, which is compatible with ARM MCUs from different ARM MCU manufactures, can be run on different operating systems and is also open-source.This paper is aimed at developing a new cross-platform open-source debugging system based on the newest debugging component CoreSight in the Cortex architecture, which can generalize the debugging interface between ARM MCUs from different ARM MCU providers, and can simplify the development and usage of the debugging system for ARM MCUs.An integrated debugging system consists of hardware debugger and debugging software on PC. This paper focused on the incompatibility between the protocols of different commercial debugging systems, and explained in detail about how to use the CoreSight debugging component, GDB remote serial protocol and CMSIS DAP protocol to design a cross-platform debugging system for ARM MCU. This paper put more attention on how to use the CoreSight debugging component to generalize the debugging interface between different ARM MCU providers, and proposed a GDB sever based on python and GDB remote protocol.The main contribution and efforts of this paper is as followed:It proposed a method to generalize the debugging interface between different ARM MCU providers based on CoreSight debugging interface and CMSIS DAP protocol; It designed a hardware debugger based on STM32F103 and realized the CMSIS DAP protocol stack and usb driver; It designed a GDB server based on Python and GDB remote protocol, which can be ran on multiple operation systems. In the GDB server, it also realized the conversion between the GDB cmd and the register configuration of the CoreSight debugging component; It raised a method to use an open-source software Pylnstaller to package the python source code in order to release the GDB server in the form of a single executable file.Finally, with the hardware debugger and GDB sever designed by this paper, and along with the GDB debugging software, this paper finished the tests on different development platforms to verify the debugging and flash download function of the whole system. It also raised quite a few comparison tests with the commercial debugging systems, and the test results showed the fact that although the debugging system designed by this paper is much cheaper than the commercial ones, it still plays a nice performance for debugging system and has a strong compatibility, which is quite meaningful and can be taken as a role model for China to design its own debugging system for ARM MCU with proprietary intellectual property rights. On the other hand, the GDB server designed in this paper was shared in some open-source meetings and activities, and it was accepted by the open-source software fans.