BELK-TN-008: Integrating Visual Studio Code and Lauterbach PowerView TRACE32

Info Box Applies to Bora Applies to BORA Xpress Applies to BORA Lite

This technical note was validated against specific versions of hardware and software. What is described here may not work with other versions.

History

Version	Date	Notes
1.0.0	February 2020	First public release

Introduction

This Technical Note (TN) shows how to integrate Visual Studio Code (VSC) and Lauterbach PowerView TRACE32 (PVT32). The integration aims to:

• Debugging the program in VSC by using PVT32 to run it on the target
• To jump from PVT32 to VSC (in editing mode) to edit the source file where the bug was found.

This article also shows how to configure VSC in order to cross-build a Makefile-based application. This configuration supports cross-toolchain error messages to jump on erroneous lines with a simple click.

Testbed

To test the procedure, the same testbed described here was used. Therefore, the application used to validate the procedure is freertos_hello_world.

With regard to VSC, the following version was used:

Version: 1.41.1 (system setup)
Commit: 26076a4de974ead31f97692a0d32f90d735645c0
Date: 2019-12-18T14:58:56.166Z
Electron: 6.1.5
Chrome: 76.0.3809.146
Node.js: 12.4.0
V8: 7.6.303.31-electron.0
OS: Windows_NT x64 6.1.7601

Integrating VSC e PVRT32

Debugging in VSC

After opening VSC from the root directory of the freertos_hello_world project, install the Native Debug extension.

Then, create a launch.json file by selecting Debug->Add Configuration->GDB. The file should look like this:

 1 {
 2     // Use IntelliSense to learn about possible attributes.
 3     // Hover to view descriptions of existing attributes.
 4     // For more information, visit: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=830387
 5     "version": "0.2.0",
 6     "configurations": [
 7         {
 8             "name": "Debug (PowerView TRACE32)",
 9             "type": "gdb",
10             "request": "launch",
11             //"target": "${workspaceRoot}/Debug/freertos_hello_world.elf",
12             "target": "r:/home/llandre/devel/formulasae/ecu/boralite/workspace-2019.1/freertos_hello_world/Debug/freertos_hello_world.elf",
13             "gdbpath": "e:/Xilinx/SDK/2019.1/gnu/aarch32/nt/gcc-arm-none-eabi/bin/arm-none-eabi-gdb.exe",
14             "cwd": "${workspaceRoot}",
15             "valuesFormatting": "parseText",
16             "autorun": [
17                 "target remote localhost:30000",
18                 "symbol-file ${workspaceRoot}/Debug/freertos_hello_world.elf",
19             ]
20         }
21     ]
22 }