One of my goals w/OpenOCD is that it becomes yet another thing that hardware vendors have to "check off" on the GCC toolchain list. Not having OpenOCD support should be like not having GDB support.
This is a long way off, but it's something to aspire to. Short term(a year or so), I'd like to see robustness for the ARM target *much* improved and the target library become increasingly support more targets and support them better. OpenOCD should be the best and cheapest alternative (in terms of engineering & marketing effort) for ARM chip vendors. I'm not concerned about hardware cost to developers, because putting an ft2232 on an eval board costs $1, it doesn't get any cheaper... It would be nice to have support for other targets than ARM, and we're doing well w/MIPS, but we really need a significantly bigger community or direct support from hardware vendors (the gorillas get things for free, the chimps don't...) to boast equally broad MIPS support as ARM support. Either that or ARM support has to reach a point of maturity where MIPS can start to catch up. Then again ARM is messier than MIPS. PowerPC is hard because OpenOCD does not have the leverage to pry open the NDAs that shroud the PowerPC architecture so that gets to be a pain with open source development. In terms of getting levarage with smaller chip vendors, I believe http://www.vinchip.com is a case in point, but I have no idea if their 32 bit risc is just another ARM or whether it's something proprietary(didn't really look). Eventually I hope that we'll be able to identify some killer features that closed source solutions just don't offer and that it will become uneconomical to implement from scratch for each JTAG debugger. I don't really know what those features might be though. Some ideas: - Threads support(e.g. eCos, FreeRTOS, etc. threads) - Profiling support(??) there is profiling support in OpenOCD now, but I haven't heard about anyone using it. - Connect up to other GPL code. We're already connected to GDB as much as we should be... What else? - Killer FPGA soft CPU workflow support(not quite sure what that means yet :-) -- Øyvind Harboe Embedded software and hardware consulting services http://www.zylin.com _______________________________________________ Openocd-development mailing list Openocd-development@lists.berlios.de https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/openocd-development
