2.5. File I/O over ARM semihosting support¶
2.5.1. Target Side Setup¶
barebox can communicate with debug programs attached via SWD/JTAG by means of ARM semihosting protocol.
Not all of the I/O primitives necessary to implement a full filesystem are exposed in ARM semihosting API and because of that some aspects of filesystem functionality are missing. Implementation does not have support for listing directories. This means a ls - list a file or directory to a SMHFS-mounted path will show an empty directory. Nevertheless, the files are there.
Example:
barebox:/ mount -t smhfs /dev/null /mnt/smhfs
2.5.2. Host Side Setup¶
FIXME: Currently OpenOCD does not work correctly if Barebox is built with MMU enabled, so before using this feature, please make sure that MMU is disabled in your particular configuration
To make semihosting work host machine connected to the target via JTAG/SWD must have semihosting capable debug software running. One such tool would be OpenOCD. For ARM9 and ARM11 CPUs most recent release of OpenOCD should suffice, however for ARMv7A based devices patched version from here http://openocd.zylin.com/#/c/2908/ has to be used.
The following steps are required to set up a operational semihosting channel:
In a terminal start OpenOCD and specify your particular board and debug adapter used.
In a separate terminal connect to OpenOCD via telnet
telnet localhost 4444
In resulting telnet session execute the following commands:
halt arm semihosting on resume
After that is done all of the semihosting related functions should be ready to use.
