Alright, I looked into the possible bug mentioned in the last paragraph of my previous message and it seems the code is actually correct. What I thought was that if register pair Z overflows, subsequent reads would read from incorrect memory locations. However, that does not seem to be the case - according to AVR Instruction Set Manual DS40002198A, ELPM instruction post-increment "applies to the entire 24-bit concatenation of the RAMPZ and Z-Pointer Registers"

As for the change of _eronly however, I still think that is incorrect. Will try to look into that more during the evening unless someone figures something else out.

What compiler are you using anyway? From the kernel version mentioned in GitHub I assume gcc 14.2? Might be the reason why everything works fine for me and not for anyone else, I am still on 5.4 from Debian stable. (Can try that too, Debian testing also has 14.2.)

On 2025-05-28 09:16, kr....@kerogit.eu wrote:
Hello,

I don't that is a correct fix and in fact, from a quick look at things it seems to me that it actually introduces another bug. As described in src/atmega/atmega_head.S, that value is supposed to be "Start of .data section in FLASH". You changed it to end of .data section in FLASH. It is used after __do_copy_data label as an address where initialized data start in flash memory. So if I read this correctly, you are copying incorrect data to your initialized variables.

If the program starts working this way, that might suggest that the initialization data are placed incorrectly in the image? Anyway, the linker script is pretty much identical to linker script of mega1284p-xplained and that one works out of the box without need to move _eronly.

Hm, looking at this, I think I just spotted a bug in __do_copy_data but that would only hit if your initialized data region crossed a 64kB boundary. Is that the case in any chance? It would cause _some_ initialized variables to contain random garbage...

On 2025-05-28 07:17, Matteo Golin wrote:
Managed to find a fix here: https://github.com/apache/nuttx/pull/16457

On Tue, May 27, 2025 at 11:24 PM Matteo Golin <matteo.go...@gmail.com>
wrote:

Thank you for your help KR!

I also noticed this CONFIG_RAM_START=0x800100. Unfortunately, changing
that value to the proper 0x800200 did not really help the issue.

I went ahead and generated the disassembly like you suggested, and it does appear that the .text section starts with jump instructions for all the
interrupt vectors:

00000000 <_stext>:
       0:       0c 94 72 00     jmp     0xe4    ; 0xe4 <__start>
       4:       0c 94 95 00     jmp     0x12a   ; 0x12a <atmega_int0>
       8:       0c 94 98 00     jmp     0x130   ; 0x130 <atmega_int1>
       c:       0c 94 9b 00     jmp     0x136   ; 0x136 <atmega_int2>
      10:       0c 94 9e 00     jmp     0x13c   ; 0x13c <atmega_int3>
      14:       0c 94 a1 00     jmp     0x142   ; 0x142 <atmega_int4>
      18:       0c 94 a4 00     jmp     0x148   ; 0x148 <atmega_int5>
      1c:       0c 94 a7 00     jmp     0x14e   ; 0x14e <atmega_int6>
      20:       0c 94 aa 00     jmp     0x154   ; 0x154 <atmega_int7>
24: 0c 94 ad 00 jmp 0x15a ; 0x15a <atmega_pcint0> 28: 0c 94 b0 00 jmp 0x160 ; 0x160 <atmega_pcint1> 2c: 0c 94 b3 00 jmp 0x166 ; 0x166 <atmega_pcint2>
      30:       0c 94 b6 00     jmp     0x16c   ; 0x16c <atmega_wdt>
34: 0c 94 b9 00 jmp 0x172 ; 0x172 <atmega_tim2_compa> 38: 0c 94 bc 00 jmp 0x178 ; 0x178 <atmega_tim2_compb> 3c: 0c 94 bf 00 jmp 0x17e ; 0x17e <atmega_tim2_ovf> 40: 0c 94 c2 00 jmp 0x184 ; 0x184 <atmega_tim1_capt> 44: 0c 94 c5 00 jmp 0x18a ; 0x18a <atmega_tim1_compa> 48: 0c 94 c8 00 jmp 0x190 ; 0x190 <atmega_tim1_compb>
...and so on...

`g_idle_topstack` is 0x800e2b in the disassembly. With RAM_START being 0x800200, and a size of 8192 bytes, that gives a `heap_size` of 5076 bytes.
That all seems fine.

However, printing out the value of `g_idle_topstack` (in binary using
`up_putc`) I can see that the value does not match. The printed value is
"1000011001110110" while the binary representation of 0x800e2b is
"100000000000111000101011".
Printing out the `heap_size` tells me it's "1111100111001101", which is
not 5076.

It seems your suspicion about a mismatch is probably correct, although
it's not due to a misplaced vector table it seems.

I did, for fun, try enabling `CONFIG_DEBUG_OPT_UNUSED_SECTIONS` and it did remove the vectors at the start of the assembly file. That image didn't
work.
Then I kept `CONFIG_DEBUG_OPT_UNUSED_SECTIONS` enabled and put the
`KEEP(*(.vectors))` suggestion in the linker script. Vectors are kept in the image, and `g_idle_topstack` changes to 0x800be4. This image didn't
work either.

That got me thinking if there was another section getting unexpectedly tossed, so I put `KEEP(...)` around basically everything in the linker
script. That didn't produce a different result, and still had the
`g_idle_topstack` of 0x800e2b.

I will continue to debug this, but if you have any other suggestions
please let me know. Thank you very much for all your help so far!

Matteo

On Tue, May 27, 2025 at 7:33 PM <kr....@kerogit.eu> wrote:

Thanks to you as well.

I spotted an error in the config posted both in the issue #16444 and PR
#16443. It is the

CONFIG_RAM_START=0x800100

Unless I overlooked something, the RAM starts at address 0x200
(0x800200) for AtMega 2560.

Not sure if that's what causing the problem though - as far as I can
see, that value is actually only used as an input to CONFIG_RAM_END
calculation and incorrect value in this macro simply reduces heap size.

The symptoms of the bug would match though - the program would be trying
to use I/O registers as RAM.

Thing is - seeing the bug was narrowed down to heap initialization in nx_start - I remember that I ran into pretty much the same issue when adding support for AVR DA/DB family... and I can't remember what was the
problem.

Maybe check the disassembly file? (RAW_DISASSEMBLY needs to be set for the file to be generated.) Verify that the .text section starts with jmp instructions for interrupt vectors. This is only a vague memory but I
think that I ran into the issue because the linker removed .vectors
section, thinking it was unreferenced. (But that should not happen here, the linked config shows CONFIG_DEBUG_OPT_UNUSED_SECTIONS is not set.)

Anyway, when that happened, the whole program got "shifted" - except for
program memory that stored values of initialized variables. The data
copy loop in initialization code (atmega_head.S) then read the values
from the shifted location leading to a mismatch - variables were
populated with wrong data. One of those variables was g_idle_topstack which directly sets start of heap. I think it initialized it to zero...?

Again, all of this is based on vague memory. TLDR version is: if able, check g_idle_topstack in up_allocate_heap and verify that it is correct.


On 2025-05-27 15:28, Alan C. Assis wrote:
> Thank you KR,
>
> I posted your message in that issue for reference.
>
> I have a BK-AVR128 board:
> https://aliexpress.com/item/1005006234334573.html
> and will test NuttX on it to confirm.
>
> If everything is working as expected I will submit the board support to
> the
> mainline.
>
> BR,
>
> Alan
>
> On Tue, May 27, 2025 at 6:39 AM <kr....@kerogit.eu> wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> as mentioned in one of my previous e-mails to this list (RFC:
>> decoupling
>> ability to always panic from board_reset), I noticed #16444 and #16443
>> on GitHub.
>>
>> I found some time to look into this and I believe I found the reason
>> for
>> "If you add avr_lowputc calls in the board initialization code, you'll
>> see that the TX LED stays stuck on indefinitely."
>>
>> Provided the board initialization code that sentence is talking about
>> is
>> atmega_boardinitialize() in avr_boot.c, then avr_lowputc() likely does
>> not work because of the configuration used. According to #16444, the
>> configuration has:
>>
>> CONFIG_DEV_CONSOLE=y
>> CONFIG_CONSOLE_SYSLOG=y
>>
>> These two are processed in src/atmega/atmega_config.h
>>
>> #ifndef CONFIG_DEV_CONSOLE
>> #  undef  USE_SERIALDRIVER
>> #  undef  USE_EARLYSERIALINIT
>> #else
>> #  if defined(CONFIG_CONSOLE_SYSLOG)
>> #    undef  USE_SERIALDRIVER
>> #    undef  USE_EARLYSERIALINIT
>> #  elif defined(HAVE_USART_DEVICE)
>> #    define USE_SERIALDRIVER 1
>> #    define USE_EARLYSERIALINIT 1
>> #  else
>> #    undef  USE_SERIALDRIVER
>> #    undef  USE_EARLYSERIALINIT
>> #  endif
>> #endif
>>
>> With the configuration above, the outer ifndef is not true and first
>> if
>> defined in else block is true, which results into:
>>
>> undef  USE_SERIALDRIVER
>> undef  USE_EARLYSERIALINIT
>>
>> Since CONFIG_STANDARD_SERIAL is also set, the undef of
>> USE_SERIALDRIVER
>> is reverted by define USE_SERIALDRIVER 1 later. However,
>> USE_EARLYSERIALINIT remains unset.
>>
>> This causes avr_earlyserialinit() to not be built nor called from
>> avr_lowinit(). Serial port peripheral is therefore not initialized yet
>> when atmega_boardinitialize() is called. I don't know what exactly
>> happens when you attempt to transmit data with the port not enabled
>> but
>> my guess would be that "transmit data register empty" status flag is
>> just never cleared and the program ends up in a loop waiting for that
>> to
>> happen.
>>
>>
>> Other than that - I recently tested NSH on mega1284p-xplained (well, a
>> breadboard with the chip stuck in it actually) and it worked for me.
>> As
>> far as I can see, all AtMega devices use the same code for managing
>> serial ports so it should work out of the box.
>>
>> Someone somewhere in some forum on the net has or had a footer in his
>> posts saying something along the lines of that non-functional serial
>> port is 99% mismatching baud rates, might be worth a re-check.
>>
>> As for the PR itself (copying from e-mail mentioned at the beginning)
>> -
>> I would recommend trying to use KEEP(*(.vectors)) as seen in
>> boards/avr/avrdx/breadxavr/scripts/breadxavr.ld - the default config
>> should then not need the "# CONFIG_DEBUG_OPT_UNUSED_SECTIONS is not
>> set"
>> line.
>>


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