AVR-Chat

This is an informative post, I'm pretty certain of my results and I don't really have a question.

AVR Studio 4.19 does not work with AVR Toolchain 3.4.0.  It crashes at Start Debugging.  Everything is fine with Toolchain 3.3.1.

This probably means that Atmel are dropping support for AVR Studio 4.x in the toolchain to force people to move to Atmel Studio 6.  I have used Studio 6 and hate it, so this is not good news for me.  Studio 6 is typical Microsoft bloatware and slows everything to a crawl.  I filled out an on-line survey from Atmel about this and I'd be really interested in the overall result, but, of course, it us unlikely to be published.

Graham Davies
ECROS Technology

On Aug 8, 2012, at 7:00 AM, bayramdavies wrote:

> I have used Studio 6 and hate it, so this is not good news for me.  Studio 6 is typical Microsoft bloatware and slows everything to a crawl.

The problem is its written in .Net, so its not native code. Apple ran PowerPC code faster on Intel than native on PowerPC but Microsoft can't seem to make a pseudocode machine run 1/10th the native CPU speed. There are an awful lot of Visual Basic fans who refuse to go beyond VB6 because of mandatory .Net turns their GHz computers back about 10 years into MHz.

After boot Atmel Studio takes 3 minutes to boot on my XP Pro quad CPU 3.0 GHz development box.

It and its latest gcc were driving me bonkers in the debugger for having moved things around worse than Freescale's Metrowerks compilers. Quite often the Atmel debugger breaks occur AFTER the desired line. Spending more time in disassembly view than I have in years.

The new library format seems to put everything possible in header files as "inline static" (or is it "static inline"?) which is also a pain to single step debug.

And sadly the XPLAIN A3BU is about 1 step newer than 4.18 supports. No time to select a different CPU or hack support back into 4.18.

Atmel Studio 6.0 is bad enough to tempt me to download Linux as nothing but an AVR development host.

--
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@HiWAAY.net
============================================================
Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.

I just timed loading Studio 6 on my quad 3.0 Ghz box.   23 seconds,
acceptable to me.   Maybe it's because I'm running Windows 7 x64 on it?

 

Steve

From: AVR-Chat@yahoogroups.com [mailto:AVR-Chat@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf
Of David Kelly
Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2012 6:21 AM
To: AVR-Chat@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [AVR-Chat] AVR Studio 4.19 does not work with AVR Toolchain
3.4.0 (informative)

 

  


On Aug 8, 2012, at 7:00 AM, bayramdavies wrote:

> I have used Studio 6 and hate it, so this is not good news for me. Studio
6 is typical Microsoft bloatware and slows everything to a crawl.

The problem is its written in .Net, so its not native code. Apple ran
PowerPC code faster on Intel than native on PowerPC but Microsoft can't seem
to make a pseudocode machine run 1/10th the native CPU speed. There are an
awful lot of Visual Basic fans who refuse to go beyond VB6 because of
mandatory .Net turns their GHz computers back about 10 years into MHz.

After boot Atmel Studio takes 3 minutes to boot on my XP Pro quad CPU 3.0
GHz development box.

It and its latest gcc were driving me bonkers in the debugger for having
moved things around worse than Freescale's Metrowerks compilers. Quite often
the Atmel debugger breaks occur AFTER the desired line. Spending more time
in disassembly view than I have in years.

The new library format seems to put everything possible in header files as
"inline static" (or is it "static inline"?) which is also a pain to single
step debug.

And sadly the XPLAIN A3BU is about 1 step newer than 4.18 supports. No time
to select a different CPU or hack support back into 4.18.

Atmel Studio 6.0 is bad enough to tempt me to download Linux as nothing but
an AVR development host.

--
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@HiWAAY.net <mailto:dkelly%40HiWAAY.net> 
============================================================
Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.





[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

On Aug 8, 2012, at 9:03 AM, Steven Hodge wrote:

> I just timed loading Studio 6 on my quad 3.0 Ghz box.   23 seconds,
> acceptable to me.   Maybe it's because I'm running Windows 7 x64 on it?

Could be. 32 bit XP Pro SP-latest here. The HD I/O on that machine seems to be 10x slower than any other. I have an open problem ticket with the guy who installed the OS as I don't want to mess with it, and there are apparently 5 other identical machines with the same problem. Driver says its talking in UDMA Mode 5.

Clearly Atmel needs to port Studio into Apple's Xcode environment to solve this problem.  :-)

--
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@HiWAAY.net
============================================================
Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.

--- In AVR-Chat@yahoogroups.com, David Kelly <dkelly@...> wrote:

> ... sadly the XPLAIN A3BU is about 1
> step newer than 4.18 supports ...

Maybe I have good news for you, then.  I have used the XMEGA-A3BU Xplained with AVR Studio 4.19 and AVR Toolchain 3.3.1.  I have met no problems, in spite of what has been said here about AVR Studio 4.19.  It boots completely in five seconds on a three-and-a-half year old dual-core 2.1 GHz Athlon machine with 4 Gbytes.  Except that the UNIX shell command is missing, AVR Toolchain works just like WinAVR.

I also abhor the inlining of library functionality.  GCC does a perfectly good job of inlining small functions anyway, so it is completely unnecessary.  However, I really don't use any Atmel library functions, so this doesn't affect me much.

Graham.

At 10:00 PM 8/08/2012, you wrote:
>This probably means that Atmel are dropping support for AVR Studio 4.x in
>the toolchain to force people to move to Atmel Studio 6.

Correct, as it has been mentioned many times at AVRFreaks. :-)
There was talk of a newer version of winAvr but I guess someone
knocked that on the head.

I'm still using Studio 4.18 SP2 as I don't need anything else at the moment,
at first I thought I'd give AS5 (now 6) a year before downloading, it's now
1.5+ years and my yearning for it just diminishes every day. Just too old
and cranky to put up with stuff I guess.


Regards

John Samperi

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Ampertronics Pty. Ltd.
11 Brokenwood Place Baulkham Hills, NSW 2153 AUSTRALIA
Tel. (02) 9674-6495
Website  http://www.ampertronics.com.au
*Electronic Design * Custom Products * Contract Assembly
********************************************************

> There was talk of a newer version of winAvr but I guess someone
> knocked that on the head.

There are some newer snap-shots, such as GCC 4.7.1 here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mobilechessboar/files/avr-gcc%20snapshots%20(Win32)/
Should get you support for the newer XMega parts.

You still need to use the tools from the WinAVR 2010 utils/bin
directory to get such things as Make and SH.

> I'm still using Studio 4.18 SP2 as I don't need anything else at the
> moment,
> at first I thought I'd give AS5 (now 6) a year before downloading, it's
> now 1.5+ years and my yearning for it just diminishes every day.

I made the mistake of installing 6.  It broken Visual Studio C++ 20120
Express, CMake/LLVM/CLang.
It makes VC++ come up with an error that tells you to reinstall it to
fix the problem, which after you waste
time on doing, the problem remains.

I reported this to Atmel in their bug tracker and their reply was
instructions on how to hack CMake (replace devenv with MSBuilder).
They appear to have no interest if fixing or explaining why their
install is messing with license files that do not belong to AVR Studio
6.
Atmel is clearly not listening to their customers with this Studio5/6
fiasco.  The number one request for a new Studio was to be cross
platform, so they base it on DotNet.   Time to move to a company that
actually does care about its user base...

There is a Linux 3.4.0 tool chain, very hidden on their web site:
http://www.atmel.com/tools/ATMELAVRTOOLCHAINFORLINUX.aspx


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