[U-Boot-Users] BDI2000 vs Vision-ICE
Mike Wellington
wellington at lucent.com
Fri Jan 9 16:50:50 CET 2004
Guys-
My replies are in post.
-thanks
mike wellington
wellington at lucent.com
VanBaren, Gerald (AGRE) wrote:
> I've used both VisionICE and BDI2000 (we bought two
VisionICEs initially and only BDI2000s since then :-).
Both connect via the JTAG port and neither support traceback.
As Charlie points out, traceback requires capturing the
address and data bus which is bloody tricky on todays processors.
>
my project lead thinks visionIce/visionEvent has solved that
problem. Since our CPU core is inside an FPGA I guess I could
conceivably watch the bus with ChipScope - an FPGA-based
logic analyzer which would give me raw bus cycles.
> With a JTAG or a software only debugger you could theoretically
enable the "trace on branch" PPC exception and run at full
speed in (very short :-) bursts, saving each branch location
and then rebuild the traceback using the saved the branches,
but that would still cause a significant speed degradation
because of all the exceptions. I don't know if anyone does this.
I don't know if anyone does this either, but I think it is
an excellent idea.
I have my doubts whether this would be useful due to the speed slowdown.
>
I think my application can handle the speed slowdown.
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: u-boot-users-admin at lists.sourceforge.net
>>[mailto:u-boot-users-admin at lists.sourceforge.net]On Behalf Of Wells,
>>Charles
>>Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2004 5:57 PM
>>To: u-boot-users at lists.sourceforge.net
>>Cc: 'Mike Wellington'
>>Subject: RE: [U-Boot-Users] BDI2000 vs Vision-ICE
>>
>>
>>Mike,
>>
>>
>>>People at my place of work are telling me that the
>>>Vision-Ice supports "backtrace" and the BDI2000 does
>>>not.
>>
>>I don't believe visionICE supports what you describe, but visionEVENT
>>(another WRS/EST product) does. visionEVENT behaves like a
>>classic "bus
>>capture" analyzer. It's no longer a "10-bin BDM port
>>connected device."
>>visionEVENT is housed in a seperate box that attaches to the
>>bottom of the
>>visionICE case and requires two 80-pin high-density connectors on your
>>target for its connection. Further, visionEVENT imposes some nasty
>>restrictions on the target (e.g. not being able to run the
>>CPU clock at 2x
>>bus clock).
>>
>>We bought the visionICE/visionEVENT stuff a couple of years
>>ago. I use
>>visionICE regularly and it works adequately for bringing up
>>new targets and
>>debugging startup code. We haven't use visionEVENT much at
>>all. We've just
>>never needed its capabilities. I've never used the BDI2000,
>>but it sounds
>>like its Linux integration is better than either visionICE or
>>visionEVENT
>>(although WRS may have improved this since we took delivery
>>of ours).
Some think the visionICE, visionEVENT stuff has improved. I'll
find out soon enough since management went ahead and bought it.
>>
>>BTW, I agree with Wolfgang's earlier point. What really
>>matters is the
>>capabilities of the debugger software front-end. One of
>>these days, I need
>>to get someone around here to approve the purchase of a
>>BDI2000 and see how
>>it compares.
>>
Our debugger front-end is supposed to be great. I haven't
fired it up yet for real. I kinda need a U-Boot bootloader
for the Xilinx ML300/PPC405 first. Or I could use Redboot ( part
of eCos Real-Time OS ) which I already have sorce for a ML300/PPC405
but I haven't figured out how to build it yet.
-EOF-
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