CCS V5.5 long long support in debugger (280x Piccolo)

StephanS

Genius 4077 points

Hi,

I am using CCS 5.5 and saw that it seems to have problems displaying long long (64 bit) variables.

Every long long (or unsigned long long) is displayed as long (or unsigned long) in the debugger.

The compiler works correct.

Is this a known problem?

I saw that this was also a problem for MSP430, but this was obviously solved.

over 11 years ago

0 desouza over 11 years ago

TI__Guru**** 171224 points

Hi,

I can't reproduce it here in my CCSv5.5 setup (check the attached screen). I am simply defining this variable and displaying it in the Expressions view.

I am not sure if you already checked the interesting discussions below that talk about some possible pitfalls with 64-bit variables from a compiler perspective.

http://e2e.ti.com/support/development_tools/compiler/f/343/t/290718.aspx

http://e2e.ti.com/support/development_tools/compiler/f/343/t/285500.aspx

http://e2e.ti.com/support/development_tools/compiler/f/343/p/318652/1109614.aspx#1109614

Regards,

Rafael

0 StephanS over 11 years ago in reply to desouza

Genius 4077 points

Hi,

see my attached screenshot - compiler works correctly, debugger does not.

"secs" are 64 bit, but shown only as 32 bit.

The compiler generated assembly shows

.sym _secs,4, 15, 4, 64
so this seems to be okay from compiler perspective.

What else can be wrong?

0 StephanS over 11 years ago in reply to StephanS

Genius 4077 points

Is there a dependency on which outfile format is used?

We are using COFF, not DWARF.

0 StephanS over 11 years ago in reply to StephanS

Genius 4077 points

Any news on this?

Can we provide additional info to help reproducing this issue?

0 Raymond Pang over 11 years ago in reply to StephanS

TI__Intellectual 2625 points

Hi Stephan,

If you can send us a sample .out file to us, we can investigate the issue.

Regards,
Raymond

0 StephanS over 11 years ago in reply to Raymond Pang

Genius 4077 points

Hi Raymond,

Outfile is sent via mail.

Regards,

Stephan

0 Raymond Pang over 11 years ago in reply to StephanS

TI__Intellectual 2625 points

Hi Stephan,

I have investigated your issue.

Since you built your code with -symdebug:coff, the debug info are encoded in the COFF symbol table with auxiliary entries.

The COFF symbol entry looks like:

    <10000> "_AsLongLongWord" (defined in section ".ebss:part1" (90))
       Value:          0x00008004 Kind:        defined
       Binding:        global      Type:        object
       Storage Class: C_EXT       Basic Type: unsigned long
       Size:           64 bits

The entry tells us that the variable is of unsigned long type.

The reason that your variables had types of "unsigned long" instead of "unsigned long long" is that COFF does not have a tag to represent a long long type.

The bit size of 64 is stored in an auxiliary entry.

However, we ignore the info and use the size of the unsigned long as the size of the variable because the COFF spec does not indicate any auxiliary entries for C_EXT.

I suppose that this is a debugger bug for not processing the bit size info.

However, we are deprecating COFF debug info support in favour of DWARF.

I do not think we will fix this bug soon.

I would advise that you should switch to dwarf debug info.

Regards,

Raymond

0 StephanS over 11 years ago in reply to Raymond Pang

Genius 4077 points

Hi Raymond,

that's what I already expected - COFF is not fully supported by the debugger any more...

We would have switched to DWARF format already, but we are using TI DSPs for over 10 years now and have various tools (flash programmers, serial monitors) that rely on parsing COFF format.
It would be quite a big task to add DWARF capabilities to all these tools.

So I understand TIs reasons to switch to the newer DWARF format, but I would really request full support for COFF.

It would be great if you could add this bug to your SDOWP system.

Regards,

Stephan

0 StephanS over 11 years ago in reply to StephanS

Genius 4077 points

We could generate 2 seperate outfiles - one in COFF, one in DWARF format and use DWARF only for debug, COFF for all other tasks.

The problem is that they do NOT have the same content - the resulting HEX-file is different.

0 Raymond Pang over 11 years ago in reply to StephanS

TI__Intellectual 2625 points

I did enter the bug into the system yesterday.

The bug # is SDSCM00049563.

I will see if I can raise the priority of this bug.

Regards,

Raymond

0 Raymond Pang over 11 years ago in reply to Raymond Pang

TI__Intellectual 2625 points

Hi Stephan,

I have fixed the bug.

The debugger will promote the long integer symbol with bit size 64 to a long long symbol.

So you will see the correct types and sizes in the expression/variable views.

The bug fix will be included in the upcoming CCS v6 release.

Regards,

Raymond

0 StephanS over 11 years ago in reply to Raymond Pang

Genius 4077 points

Hi Raymond,

that's great, thanks!

This will be definitely a reason for us to add subscription to our existing CCS V5 license...

Stephan

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CCS V5.5 long long support in debugger (280x Piccolo)