Looking for Advice on Selecting Trace Hardware and Software for RTEMS and Cortex-M

[Isaac Gutekunst]

Hi All,

We are considering purchasing trace hardware from Lauterbach as it is the only solution we 
could find that has an independent trace and and debug tool i.e. isn't tied into a particular 
compiler tool chain.

I have a suspicion that (in theory), any debugger supporting the ARMv7m instruction set and the 
ARM EABI (especially calling conventions), should be able to debug and trace any Cortex-M 
processor, regardless of the compiler tool chain used to build the file. Is their any truth to 
this suspicion?


Does anyone have experience with this or other debug and trace tools for Cortex-M that work 
with RTEMS (or at least GCC and ELF files) and a Linux host?

To clarify what I mean by trace, I am interested support for the ARM CoreSight debug 
architecture including ETM, ITM, ETB, etc that can do instruction level trace and display data 
from the ITM, potentially doing interesting things like plotting data.

Regards,

-- 
Isaac Gutekunst
Embedded Systems Software Engineer
isaac.gutekunst at vecna.com
www.vecna.com