1.27. Debugging with OpenOCD

Barebox can be configured to break on prebootloader and main barebox entry. This breakpoint can not be resumed and will stop the board to allow the user to attach a JTAG debugger with OpenOCD. Additionally, barebox provides helper scripts to load the symbols from the ELF binaries. The python scripts require pyelftools. To load the scripts into your gdb session, run the following command in the barebox directory:

(gdb) source scripts/gdb/helper.py

This makes two new commands available in gdb, bb-load-symbols and bb-skip-break. bb-load-symbols can load either the main barebox file or one of the .pbl files in the image directories. The board needs to be stopped in either the prebootloader or main barebox breakpoint, and gdb needs to be connected to OpenOCD. To continue booting the board, bb-skip-break jumps over the breakpoint and continues the barebox execution.