Re: gdb port to or1k

["Damjan Lampret" <lampret at opencores dot org>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "J.T. Conklin" <jtc@redback.com>

> Please note that it is a GDB goal (or at least one of my my goals as
> a GDB hacker) that features be available on as many host machines as
> possible.  While there have been back ends which have been integrated
> into GDB that need a special vendor-supplied DLL which ties it to a
> single host platform (ie. windows), I'd rather avoid this if at all
> possible.
>
> If I understand your intentions, you intend to use a bi-directional
> parallel port to bit-bang a JTAG like interface.  This limits the
> feature to machines with bi-directional parallel hardware running
> OS's that allow user-level programs access to the individual lines.
> I think this is OK.
>

In fact this is our goal as well. We'd like to be able to use any platform
in order to debug our target (Linux, Solaris, Windows etc).

So we don't want to have a low level driver for a parallel port that would
work just on Linux/i386. At the moment we are investigating compatibility
between parallel ports on different platforms and it seems that basic
centronics (8 out + 5 in) is supported by majority of them. We could
certainly use help from GDB community to help us test different parallel
port implementations and access to them under different operating systems
(Marko and me only have access to i386 HW running Linux or Windows and to
Sun Blade 100 running Solaris 8).

I think it would be great to have a "standard" parallel port interface for
all targets that use JTAG/BDM or something similar. As you probably know a
lot of microcontrollers lately use some kind of serial debug protocol and
having a common infrastructure in GDB to support all of them through a much
faster parallel port would be great (something faster than a serial port on
a host).

regards,
Damjan