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TM4C1294NCPDT: Debugging with FreeRTOS

Sasha Gold
Prodigy 143 points
Part Number: TM4C1294NCPDT
Other Parts Discussed in Thread: EK-TM4C1294XL

Hello,

I was hoping to be able to use ROV, ROV Classic, or even FreeRTOS Task Aware Debugger for GDB to debug my FreeRTOS TM4C Project in Code Composer Studio. If someone could provide support for any of these, that would be appreciated.

The issues I get are:

ROV: "ROV _connect failed to start agent: MissingExtension: MISSING_EXTENTSION"

ROV Classic: "XDC path or XDC Tools location not set. Set project/global RTSC preferences and relaunch ROV"

FreeRTOS Tools: Shows loading bar indefinitely

Environment Details:

For the purpose of isolating the issue I am testing with the Hello Example project from spma085.

CCS v11.2.0

Board: Tiva C Series Connected Launchpad EK-TM4C1294XL

Connection: Stellaris In-Circuit Debug Interface

Compiler version: TI v20.2.5.LTS

Output format: eabi (ELF)

TivaWare for TM4C SDK: v2.2.0.295

XDC Tools: v3.62.1.16_core

Can someone kindly confirm if the combination of tools I am using is even valid for this purpose?

  • +1
    TI__Guru*** 135355 points

    Hello Sasha,

    We do not have ROV capability offered for FreeRTOS on TM4C at this time. Our FreeRTOS examples were developed recently and we have not gotten to a point where we are able to support ROV for FreeRTOS. The TI-RTOS offering does have ROV capability.

    Best Regards,

    Ralph Jacobi

  • 0 in reply to Ralph Jacobi
    Prodigy 143 points

    Hi Ralph, thanks very much for your reply.

    I've found a few places in TI documentation that suggest ROV does work with FreeRTOS. If this is not the case, I'd love to see TI put their documentation to rights so as to save customers some frustration. Or at the least list the MCUs that ARE currently supported, as is implied by the first link.

    https://software-dl.ti.com/simplelink/esd/simplelink_cc13xx_cc26xx_sdk/5.40.00.40/exports/docs/ble5stack/ble_user_guide/html/freertos/rov.html

    https://e2e.ti.com/support/processors-group/processors/f/processors-forum/859586/faq-what-is-the-rov-runtime-object-viewer/3179297#3179297

    TI-RTOS and ROV issue

    I have attempted to use a TI-RTOS example project to test the new (not classic) ROV offering, but I haven't been able to get that to work either.

    I'm using the same tools as listed above, but am using the example project found when creating a new CCS project:

    I get the the following error in the ROV View:

    I'm still searching the forums for a potential solution.

    Is this a question of compatibility?

    As I understand it, the newest version of TI-RTOS that supports TM4C is 2.16.01.14, as shown here:

    https://software-dl.ti.com/dsps/dsps_public_sw/sdo_sb/targetcontent/tirtos/index.html

    I might have found the source of my problem here:

    https://software-dl.ti.com/dsps/dsps_public_sw/sdo_sb/targetcontent/tirtos/tirtos_tivac_known_issues.html

    Which has a broken link, I believe it should point to this:

    https://sir.ext.ti.com/jira/browse/EXT_EP-9284?jql="Internal%20ID"~TIRTOS-1887

    Which indicates that TI-RTOS 2.16.01.14 is only recommended with CCS 6.1.1 and XDCTools 3.32.00.06, where ROV only supports newer versions of CCS (7.1 or higher) and XDCTools (3.51 or later), as described here:

    https://software-dl.ti.com/ccs/esd/documents/rov_guide/html/src/rov.html

    In summary, does TI-RTOS for TM4C really support the use of ROV?

  • +1 in reply to Sasha Gold
    TI__Guru*** 135355 points

    Hello Sasha,

    Let me break this up into two topics here. I want to clarify the TI-RTOS support of ROV first as I was entirely unclear previously since I forgot there are two ROV options in Code Composer Studio.

    The two types of ROV views are the Runtime Object View feature and the ROV Classic feature. The ROV that works for TI-RTOS for TM4C is the ROV Classic feature.

    You can use up to CCS10 with that, but XDCTools should be 3.32.00.06.

    We do not have support for the new ROV feature for TI-RTOS for TM4C and we will not support that in the future. Any improvements to ROV would come with our FreeRTOS offering.

    Now with that more clearly explained, sorry for being incomplete before, I think your criticism of our lack of documentation is very fair and valid. I can't address all of your concerns, but I can give you background to help at least explain why you have run into this frustration.

    First off I can confirm other TI Arm MCUs have ROV support. These MCUs come with updated SDKs that include at an SDK level, full FreeRTOS support which includes the hooks that allow the CCS IDE to use ROV with the FreeRTOS Kernal.

    TM4C at this time has not received such an updated SDK, our FreeRTOS examples have been released in an app note specifically because we don't want to release an incomplete SDK that doesn't offer the same features that our newer MCUs like Sitara AM2x boast including ROV support for FreeRTOS.

    The reason the documentation is poor on this from your view is that each of these device families are owned by different product teams. So the team that puts together documentation for AM2x or BLE parts are doing so for their unique product families. But they can't speak to the level of support for every TI MCU.

    Unfortunately because TM4C is largely an exception in terms of this support, we haven't gotten to a point where a specific document is needed to list 'yes / no' for ROV support, but what I think we can do from a TM4C side is clarify this in the FreeRTOS app note that ROV support is not included at this time so there is a clear answer for TM4C MCUs specifically.

    Best Regards,

    Ralph Jacobi

  • 0 in reply to Ralph Jacobi
    Prodigy 143 points

    Thanks Ralph, that really clarifies things. I think and addition to the TM4C like you said would be very helpful.

    I will leave a note here for others that may peruse this post that I was able to use Stateviewer's OpenRTOS Viewer plug-in tool with FreeRTOS projects on the above outlined hardware and software. (WHIS StateViewer v2.0.13.201903221121)