Question about gel file

Robert

The gel file mostly configures and initializes the hardware – setting the various registers values so the device can work properly.  This is basically what boot loader does in normal system. Thus the simulator does not need to have gel file.

The simulator does not assume that everything is in L1, (only some of the benchmarks make this assumption). You can use linker command file or target definition to decide where the program and the data goes

Please have a look at the gel file of the board that you use, look for example in the directory where you installed ccs5:

\ccsv5\ccs_base\emulation\boards\evmc6678l\gel

And you will see what it does.

Hope that it helps.  Please send feedback for this posting

To expand on what Ran said,

A GEL file is not always needed, even on hardware with emulator. It depends on the target, what kind of initialization is needed, and where you want to do this initalization. For example, say there is a hardware target with various peripherals. Before you can use them, you need to initialize them. You can initialize it from your code. Or you can initialize it with GEL instead. Sometimes you have to have a GEL file. For example you want to load your code into external memory and before you can do that, memory must be initialized. So you can't do it from your code since you can't load it yet, so you can have GEL do it for you automatically.

Simulators tend to rely less on startup GEL files. That is because a lot of the hardware initialization is not needed. But people still use the GEL file to set up the debugger memory map and such.

I recommend reading the below app note for more insight. It talks in more detail about startup GEL files for device initialization:

http://www.ti.com/lit/an/spraa74a/spraa74a.pdf

Thanks

ki