Hi, all-
I recently got back into working on the MSP430 after a few years hiatus. I'm
using RedHat Fedora Core4 for development. I found that the msp430-gdbproxy
from sourceforge.net wouldn't recognize the MSP430F169 I had stuffed into my
board.
Following some posts on this list, I downloaded the Aug 2005 version from
www.soft-switch.org/downloads and found that it recognized my F169 just fine.
Unfortunately, this version took so long to download my 8k byte program that I
originally thought it had crashed.
After talking to Steve Underwood via email, I learned that I had to increase the
download block size with the new JTAG software from TI to get reasonable
performance. I found the following .gdbinit recommended on this mailing list:
set remoteaddresssize 64
set remotetimeout 999999
set download-write-size 512
target remote localhost:2000
set remote memory-write-packet-size 512
set remote memory-write-packet-size fixed
set remote memory-read-packet-size 512
set remote memory-read-packet-size fixed
This improved things by a factor of 10, but it was still kind of slow. I
decided to experiment with larger block sizes to see what happened. Here are
the results with my 8K program. My development machine is an Athlon 64 X2, so
gdbproxy gets a whole processor to itself. For each different block size, I
changed the "512"s in the above .gdbproxy, and restarted msp430-gdbproxy and
insight. I then did:
monitor erase all
load a.out
in the console window for each test and recorded the bits/second that gdb output
after each download. Here are the results of 5 tests at each block size:
Block Size 256 512 1024 2048 4096
1254 2416 3434 5019 6524
1279 2416 3434 5019 5931
1304 2416 3462 5019 5931
1359 2416 3434 5437 5931
1331 2416 3434 5019 5437
Average 1305.4 2416 3439.6 5102.6 5950.8
As you can see, I got a much higher download speed by going to larger block
sizes. I expect that with a program larger than 8k this effect would be
greater.
Does anyone know if there is a downside to using the larger block sizes?
When you start insight with the larger block sizes, you get two annoying dialog
boxes asking you if you really want to use the larger block size. You need to
click the "Yes" button to get any benefit. I may take a look at the gdb source
to see if I can disable these warnings.
Max Behensky
