Debugging support for ARM Cortex-M Microcontrollers with the following features:

• Support J-Link, OpenOCD GDB Server
• Partial support for PyOCD and textane/stlink (st-util) GDB Servers (SWO can only be captured via a serial port)
• Initial support for the Black Magic Probe (This has not been as heavily tested; SWO can only be captured via a serial port)
• Cortex Core Register Viewer
  • In some cases the st-util GDB server can report incomplete/incorrect registers, so there may be some issues here.
• Peripheral Register Viewer (Defined through standard SVD file)
• SWO Decoding - "console" text output and binary data (signed and unsigned 32-bit integers, Q16.16 fixed point integers, single percision floating point values)
  • The registers that are part of the DWT, TPIU, and ITM debug components will automatically be configured and do not need to be set in firmware.
  • Firmware may still need to enable the SWO output pin - as this part of the setup is microcontroller dependant.
  • Decoding ETM data over the SWO pin is not currently supported.
• Support for Custom ITM Data Decoders:
  • Ability to define JavaScript modules to decode complex data formats streamed over one or more ITM ports. Data can be printed to a output window, or sent to the graphing system.
• Live graphing of decoded ITM data.
• Raw Memory Viewer ("Cortex-Debug: View Memory" command)
• Ability to view and step through the disassembled binary. There are three ways that disassembled code will be shown:
  • Disassembly code will automatically be shown if it cannot locate the corresponding source code.
  • You can manually see the disassembly for a particular function ("Cortex-Debug: View Disassembly (Function)" command)
  • You can set the debugger to always show show disassembly ("Cortex-Debug: Set Force Disassembly" command)
• Globals and Static scopes in the variables view
• Initial support for Rust code (most functionality is working; disassembly views and variables view may still have issues)
• RTOS Support (J-Link and OpenOCD - RTOS supported depends on GDB server support)
  • As a general rule do not try to use stepping instructions before the scheduler of your RTOS has started - in many cases this tends to crash the GDB servers or leave it in an inconsistent state.

• Additional Graphing Options
• Enhanced SVD Auto-selection
• Semihosting Support

Requirements:

• ARM GCC Toolchain (https://developer.arm.com/open-source/gnu-toolchain/gnu-rm/downloads) - provides arm-none-eabi-gdb and related tools
• At least one of:
  • J-Link Software Tools - provides the J-Link GDB Server for J-Link based debuggers (https://www.segger.com/downloads/jlink)
  • OpenOCD - provides a GDB Server that can be used with a number of debuggers (http://openocd.org)
  • Texane's st-util GDB server - Only supports ST-Link Debug Probes (https://github.com/texane/stlink)
  • pyOCD GDB Server - GDB server that supports the CMSIS-DAP debugger on a number of mbed boards (https://github.com/mbedmicro/pyOCD)
  • Black Magic Probe

See https://marcelball.ca/projects/cortex-debug/ for usage information

Parts of this extension are based upon Jan Jurzitza's (WebFreak) code-debug extension (https://github.com/WebFreak001/code-debug). His project provided an excellent base for GDB MI parsing and interaction.