Microcontroller Register Viewer for GDB
Since a long time I have been using GDB + a GDB server of choice to debug many embedded targets. GDB's command line interface is powerfull and serves me really well, except for one pain:
Reading peripheral registers.
I know there's efforts like EmbSysRegView and GNU ARM Eclipse, but I really don't want to use Eclipse as a GUI for developing nor debugging. My preferred combo is Vim/Make/GCC/GDB/OpenOCD/...
So I decided to fix this in a really simple way: You load an extra .elf file containing the symbols for all the registers. This will effectively give you access to your microcontroller's peripheral registers, e.g. like this:
(gdb) p/x USART6->SR
$1 = 0xc0
(gdb) p/x USART6
$2 = {SR = 0xc0, DR = 0x0, BRR = 0x2d9, CR1 = 0x202c, CR2 = 0x0, CR3 = 0x0, GTPR = 0x0}
- Clone or download repo
cd /path/to/ucregviewmake TARGET=name_of_supported_target
- Fire up GDB, connect to remote target as usual
- In addition to your application's .ELF file, load the ucregview_xxx.elf symbols, too:
(gdb) add-symbol-file ucregview_xxx.elf 0x0
- Read any memory-mapped peripheral register
(gdb) p/x USART1->CR1
- Write to peripheral registers from GDB
(gdb) set USART6->CR1 = 0xE8(gdb) p/x USART6->CR1$3 = 0xe8
For now, only a few microcontrollers are supported, feel free to add more and file a pull request!
- STM32L051xx
- STM32F407xx