minichlink debugger instability

[lzace817]

The debugger with minichlink is quite unstable.

But instability is subjective, I would like to provide something concrete about it.

In the wireshark dump bellow at line 00000427 should be:

• 'OK' for success
• 'E NN' for an error

0000022E  24 6d 31 31 36 2c 34 23  36 35                     $m116,4# 65

0000041A  2b                                                 +
0000041B  24 37 33 30 30 32 30 33  30 23 38 66               $7300203 0#8f

00000238  2b                                                 +
00000239  24 44 23 34 34                                     $D#44

00000427  2b                                                 +

0000023E  2d                                                 -
0000023F  2d                                                 -
00000240  2d                                                 -
00000241  2b                                                 +

Note: RVHandleDisconnect seems to be the one handling it.

I hope it is usefull.

References

manual page 774

[mrx23dot]

What's the benefit of minichlink over

openocd -s "D:\Progs\MounRiver\MRS_Community\toolchain\OpenOCD\bin" -f wch-riscv.cfg -c "program build\\obj\\proj.elf verify; reset; " ?

Although verification takes me long 15s

[lzace817]

freedom.

AFAIK wchlink doesn't work with vanilla openocd. Given the modified version of openocd and the FOSS software nature, perhaps it's already supposed to be open, but I'm not a lawyer. But having more control over our tooling it good. If anyone knows better, I would be glad to hear.

[mrx23dot]

Sounds reasonable, does minichlink verify faster for you? It's awfully long on wchlink, like 10x longer than download.

And is it just a matter of changing USB drives? I don't have to reflash the programmer do I?

[lzace817]

At this moment, minichlink is pretty much unusable for debugging. It's ok for flashing and serial i/o.

About your specific problem, I'm wondering if you can drop the verify, because it may be the source of slowdown.
No reflash needed. On windows I only used the MRS, don't know about drivers.

[mrx23dot]

Thanks for the info, yeah debugging is essential for me, otherwise it's programming by iteration.

Without verify it's really fast, that's a possible solution.
I just need to sort out the VScode for gdb, got another ticket for that.