GDB fails when developing without soft device.

RE: GDB fails when developing without soft device.

TLloydUom — Tue, 30 Apr 2019 12:10:18 GMT

I forgot to reply to this as the project I'm working on is time consuming, but I found that the JLink debugger was satisfactory in continuing my development of software for the NRF52840.

RE: GDB fails when developing without soft device.

wpaul — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 21:38:08 GMT

When you first run OpenOCD and it connects to the target, it prints a bunch of information. Can you please show us that? NOTE: this means that you show us everything from the point where you run the "openocd" command. I'm particularly interested in known what version you have.

I've been using the latest version of OpenOCD from the official git repo along with GCC 8.3 and GDB 8.2 on a FreeBSD host system and it works fine for me.

-Bill

RE: GDB fails when developing without soft device.

Nguyen Hoan Hoang — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 19:04:06 GMT

Try this openocd target nrf52.cfg from https://github.com/I-SYST/EHAL/tree/master/ARM/Nordic/nRF52/src

It is known to work on with all version of GCC from 4.9 to 8 under Windows/Linux/OSX

RE: GDB fails when developing without soft device.

Vidar Berg — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 11:57:48 GMT

Hi,maybe there is something with the "Softdevice" examples that trigger a bug in GDB. We recommend using the toolchain version listed in the SDK release notes. Did you download the toolchain from https://developer.arm.com/tools-and-software/open-source-software/developer-tools/gnu-toolchain/gnu-rm?

RE: GDB fails when developing without soft device.

TLloydUom — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 11:49:01 GMT

HI Vidar. I started using the latest GCC toolchain and then back dated to the one suggested in the nrfconnect desktop app. Further experimentation found that I could debug devices that had a softdevices successfully using openocd, but not those that didn't use the softdevice.

RE: GDB fails when developing without soft device.

Vidar Berg — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 11:46:19 GMT

Glad you found a workaround. I'm don't have much experience with openOCD unfortunately. But it's a bit strange that is stopped working after updating your Linux distribution. Are you using the same version of the GCC toolchain?

RE: GDB fails when developing without soft device.

TLloydUom — Mon, 15 Apr 2019 10:50:59 GMT

I tried using the JlinkGdb server instead using:

JLinkGDBServer -if swd -device nrf52

And it seems to work, but would welcome any suggestions as to why trying to debug with openocd gives the error?