EclipseCon 2013: TCF, ARM Debugging and Raspberry Pi

The TCF Agent is Running on Raspberry Pi ! Having ARM Debug support available under EDL / BSD License in Open Source is a great move forward for our TCF project; especially as the Pi is such a cool and neat device!

Mark your EclipseCon calendars if you want to see it:

• Monay at 7pm at the Raspbery Pi and Eclipse Hackathon
• Wednesday at  7pm at the TCF BoF session

The initial ARM debug contribution came particularly timely, since it allows us to join the Raspberry Pi Hackathon Monday night at EclipseCon with the Eclipse TCF Project :) Come join us as at the Hackathon, as we try getting single-stepping to work and test the debugger against various use-cases! I'll be particularly keen to look at M2M scenarios, Lua integration for scripting, and getting the out-of-box experience really nice... I've written up quick 15-minute instructions if you want to get TCF on your Pi as well.

TCF Target Explorer debugging ls on the Raspberry Pi

Right now the TCF Debugger supports auto-discovery of the Pi (very nice for headless devices!), attaching processes, basic run-control and breakpoints; sufficient for basic debugging, but we'll want a rock solid, excellent debugger for C and C++.

The initial ARM patch was provided by individual contributor Stanislav Yakovlev, who said:

I was interested in working on a GCC toolchain, but due to complicated legal rules of GNU Foundation, it was almost impossible to get any patches in. I started working on the ARM TCF debug after ELC Europe in Barcelona last year.

With ARM debug support available in Open Source, I expect a lot uptake of TCF this year. In fact, Wind River and Xilinx are shipping first products that strongly build on Open Source TCF; right now I'm updating the TCF Homepage to talk more about these announcements. Check back in a couple days, or if you're at EclipseCon join us for the TCF BoF session on Wednesday at 7, and I'll be happy to give some demos and talk about where TCF is going.