This is the mail archive of the
newlib@sourceware.org
mailing list for the newlib project.
Semihosting fix
- From: David Hoover <spm2 at dangerous dot li>
- To: newlib at sourceware dot org
- Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2016 15:54:23 +0200
- Subject: Semihosting fix
- Authentication-results: sourceware.org; auth=none
Hello,
Code was introduced in commit 8d98f956cc398d086794e19051c3380d599022da
that breaks semihosting for ARM Cortex targets running in many
environments.
To implement semihosting, ARM bkpt or svc instructions are used to
provide system calls implementing more-or-less standard functions. One
of these system calls (HeapInfo) can be used to provide dynamic heap
and stack information to the user application.
More often than not, dynamic stack and heap information is not
available, and the system call generally provides null values in this
case. Segger GDBServer and OpenOCD 0.9.9 are examples of this.
The standard C library behavior when heap information is not available
is to permit the heap to grow (each time sbrk is called) until the
heap runs into the stack pointer. This is how sbrk worked before
commit 8d98f956cc398d086794e19051c3380d599022da. The current behavior,
when heap information is missing, is that crt0.S code writes the null
value into the __heap_limit variable, causing sbrk to believe that
the heap is full, causing most newlib calls to fail (like printf).
Here is a two-instruction fix that checks that the heap limit provided
by HeapInfo is not zero before writing it to __heap_limit. No sane
implementation would use 0 as the upper value of the heap, so this
fix, which has been tested, should not break anything. Commit
8d98f956cc398d086794e19051c3380d599022da, however, breaks all Cortex M
semihosting running on the two debuggers mentioned above, and probably
more.
Could you please consider inclusion of the following patch?
Thank you,
David Hoover
diff --git a/libgloss/arm/crt0.S b/libgloss/arm/crt0.S
index 7c662f9..b459e12 100644
--- a/libgloss/arm/crt0.S
+++ b/libgloss/arm/crt0.S
@@ -125,9 +125,11 @@
/* Set __heap_limit. */
ldr r1, [r0, #4]
+ cmp r1, #0
+ beq .LC33
ldr r2, =__heap_limit
str r1, [r2]
-
+.LC33:
ldr r1, [r0, #0]
cmp r1, #0
bne .LC32