[U-Boot-Users] BDI2000 vs Vision-ICE
Wolfgang Denk
wd at denx.de
Fri Jan 9 00:04:38 CET 2004
Dear Mike,
in message <3FFDC547.3010302 at lucent.com> you wrote:
> People at my place of work are telling me that the
> Vision-Ice supports "backtrace" and the BDI2000 does
> not. I looked on the Abatron website and it doesn't
> say. Can anyone confirm or deny this?
>
> By "backtrace", I mean the ability to set a breakpoint,
> hit that breakpoint, and be able to see the last N
> instructions executed.
I don't know about the Vision-Ice; but I've been working (several
years ago) in a project were we spent a lot of $$$ to buy a SuperTAP
ICE by Applied Microsystems exactly because they promised this
feature. It never worked for us. It didn't work at full processor
speed, and the problems where we really wanted a trace did not show
up at lower clock speeds. The other setup used a MPC8xx with bus
divider enabled (CPU clock = 2 x bus clock). With such a
configuration, the CPU does not output the signals you need for the
trace on any pins, so you cannot get any trace (no matter which
vendor's box you buy).
In my experience, this is marketing babble. For the low level stuff
("simple problems"), a good logic analyzer is at least as capable,
and for the highlevel ("complicated") problems it doesn't work
anyway, and a plain BDM/JTAG debugger plus a little brain and a lot
of experience gives beter results.
Just my $ 0.02 - ymmv.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk
--
See us @ Embedded World, Nuremberg, Feb 17 - 19, Hall 12.0 Booth 440
Phone: (+49)-8142-4596-87 Fax: (+49)-8142-4596-88 Email: wd at denx.de
By the way, ALL software projects are done by iterative prototyping.
Some companies call their prototypes "releases", that's all.
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