Re: [Avr-eclipse-user] avr-gdb is very slow

[Thomas H. <th...@in...>]

  On 02.08.2010 02:53, Trevor Johansen wrote:
> I recently switched over to Eclipse to work on my projects so i could 
> bounce between different operating systems. The main problem I am 
> having though is when debugging it is painfully slow to step through 
> the code. It takes 4s for each step in asm and at least 16s for a 
> single step in c/c++ and its just not useful at those speeds.

I just tried some debugging with my Dragon, connected to a Butterfly. 
While it was certainly not instantaneous, both C and ASM single steps 
took usually only 2s, sometimes 4-5s.

I don't know why it is running so slow on your system. First of all you 
should drop the '-d' on the avarice command line. While it is useful 
when avarice is not working, all the debug output does slow Eclipse down.

Secondly you could experiment with the avarice '--jtag-bitrate'. It 
defaults to 250khz, good for debugging an 1MHz MCU, but if your MCU has 
a higher clock you could try in increase Bitrate up to 6400khz (for a 
25MHz MCU)

If that does not help I am afraid I am out of ideas. The current 
Eclipse/CDT Debugger is slow because it always updates all variables 
after each step. This could probably be improved by tweaking the 
debugger in CDT -- something which I have planned for some time now, but 
haven't had the time to do.

If you really need fast debugging you can use AVR-Studio as a debugger. 
Just open the .elf file generated by Eclipse in AVR Studio and you can 
debug your program immediately.

>
> On a second note I see on the winavr website page that mentions 
> Eclipse their is a tab open called "AVR Device Explorer" that would be 
> really handy. I used the device info in avrstudio all the time as a 
> quick reference without the datasheets and it would be nice to do the 
> same here. Where do I enable it or is it a separate plugin or something?
In Eclipse go to 'Window -> Show View -> Other... -> AVR' and click on 
'AVR Device Explorer'.

Cheers,

Thomas