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Building,Flashing and Debugging Embedded Rust Program

Building,Flashing and Debugging Embedded Rust Program

Building,Flashing and Debugging Embedded Rust Program

Building Program

  • Cargo provides 4 different targets that cover the different processor families within that architecture.

    • thumbv6m-none-eabi, for the Cortex-M0 and Cortex-M1 processors

    • thumbv7m-none-eabi, for the Cortex-M3 processor

    • thumbv7em-none-eabi, for the Cortex-M4 and Cortex-M7 processors

    • thumbv7em-none-eabihf, for the Cortex-M4F and Cortex-M7F processors

  • The one we are interested in is last one (i.e. thumbv7em-none-eabihf) because F3 has Cortex-M4F processor in it.  
  • Before cross compiling we have to download pre-compiled version of the standard library. For that we have to run:

$ rustup target add thumbv7em-none-eabihf

  • We have to download it once after that it will be updated automatically whenever we update rust tool chain. 
  • All set, we can now compile our program for whatever target we are compiling, using following command:

$ cargo build --target thumbv7em-none-eabihf

Flashing Program

Flashing => Moving program to MCU’s memory

Every time MCU will power on it will run the program flashed last time.

Steps:

  1. Launch OpenOCD 
  2. Open GDB Server console 
  3. Connect GDB Server to OpenOCD 
  4. Load the program

 Launcing OpenOCD

We saw already what is OpenOCD, now let’s see how it works and how to initiate it. First we see how to initiate:

  1. Open up a new terminal

  2. Change directory to /temp (i.e. $ cd /tmp)

  3. Next run this command

$ openocd -f interface/stlink-v2-1.cfg -f target/stm32f3x.cfg

  

Now look at the above command carefully and the image below.

 

 Launching OpenOCD


We may observed that first we are interacting with st-link to target stm32f303.

The ST-LINK unveils a communication channel for us to target.

Initiating GDB Server

These commands only specific to gdb console. They haven't any meaning to our normal terminal/command prompt.

1.    $ <gdb> -q target/thumbv7em-none-eabihf/debug/<project-name>

<gdb> => this is System dependent debugging program to read arm binaries. It has 3 ariants gdb, gdb-multiarch* and arm-none-eabi-gdb

*In our case gdb-multiarch will work.

target/thumbv7em-none-eabihf/debug/<project-name> => Path to the binaries of projects we want to flash in MCU. 

Connecting OpenOCD

Previous command only opens gdb shell. To connect to Openocd      GDB Server run the following command. 

2.    (gdb) target remote :3333

This 3333 highlights the port number on which GDB server listens requests. And this command connects us to this port.

Connecting OpenOCD Above is the result of this command.

Loading Program

Now final step to flash our code to MCU’s persistent memory, once we connected successfully,

3.    (gdb) load

Debugging Program

Our program stopped at entry point after load command . There are few useful commands used for debugging purpose.

  • break

  • continue


break => this command is used to break program at certain point. For instance: We will run: (gdb) break main ,if we want to stop program at the start of main function.continue => this command would take us from one breakpoint to another breakpoint.

We may switch to GDB Text User Interface (TUI), for that run: (gdb) layout src ,for viewing line by line execution of program.  

We may run: (gdb) tui disable, for disabling TUI mode. While debugging run for resetting the program to initial state : (gdb) monitor reset halt. For terminating GDB session     (gdb) quit

Further commands:

  • step : for moving to next line

  • print : for printing values of variables

  • Info locals : this is for printing all values of variables at once

  • Clear shell : for clearing TUI screen

 

 

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