AVR-Chat

At 10:18 AM 1/9/2004 +0100, avrbeta@atmel.com wrote:
>Hi,
>
>Thanks for your feedback.  In your last mail you state that this below
>problem is fixed.  Both #1 and #2?

#1 was my fault, sorry. :-P
#2 has not recurred, but I didn't do anything about it.

While we're on the subject, the sim and emulation have given a pretty good 
amount of grief this week.
We're debugging another dual-processor design, this time a M128 talking to 
a M8 in a new printer design.

I wrote an app for the M8 in the sim, then brought it into the emulator 
(ICE-50)
I immediately hit bugs in the code where the sim let me do illegal things, 
but the emulator caught it.

ex:  instead of using adiw zl,1, I was using ld temp,z+ where Z was 
pointing into rom.  The sim let me do that.
While this is my fault for being sloppy, I do think that the sim should 
catch these things.

Also, we are having the same old problems with breakpoints:

Breakpoints that I set, disappear after a while, usually right after a 
build and run.
VERY annoying, when I have 10+ breakpoints set up for a specific test, and 
have to go re-set them all, again and again.

I also have instances of breakpoints that I had set and cleared previously, 
that come back on their own.
When this happens, I have to toggle them twice, to get rid of them. The 
first toggle does nothing, as far as I can tell.
VERY distracting.

At times, the sim or emulator, refuse to let me set a breakpoint.
Sometimes I can't do it with the mouse, but F9 works.
Other times, I can't do it at all, and all I can do is close the project, 
restart, and hope.

This also happens, less frequently, with F5, where pressing F5 won't run, 
but going up and selecting run off the toolbar works.

We are having these problems on three different computers, running 98 and 
xp, in sim, and in emulation (ICE-50)

All these annoyances add up to a much less than productive day.

It would be very nice, to be able to define a set of breakpoints as a 
specific test, and load/clear them as a group.
IOW, I want to run text X, so load up all the breakpoints that were set 
when I last ran test X, and clear out any other breakpoints that might be 
set. (optionally, not)
This would mitigate a lot of the existing problems with breakpoints.

Things like the LCD emulator are cute, but I wish the core platform was 
rock solid first.