Worse than not making the JTAG debugging modes public domain is that TI have in the past denied the JTAG debugger info to some embedded software tool vendors. I have an acquaintance who works for one such company in Seattle (Not Microsoft either) who informed me that TI would NOT give them the inside info for their processors. Consequently, they do not support TI whatsoever. It shouldn't take to much detective work to figure out which company I am talking about either! I certainly would have thought that it would help the sales of processor devices to have multiple vendors of the tools?
There are more vendors of C compilers than just IAR, isn't it a bit suspicious that only a few support TI? There was also the case of a local guy many years ago who reverse engineered the TI JTAG interface to some of their DSP families. TI were none to happy about that. (One may ask why? ???) It is good to see that TI are now beginning to alter that stance, as it patently makes no sense to totally hide the internal working of the JTAG interface . Anyone who seriously wanted to produce the tools could potentially reverse engineer the required bit stream anyway. How hard is it to monitor and log TMS, TCK and TDI (and maybe TRST) from a "competitors" tool? And then to reproduce them in your own tool. (Admitably, much harder than being told how in the first place, but not totally impossible either!) Perhaps TI are not hurting too much by releasing the info to the MSP group, in fact, I am sure that it will help sales of the MSP to have a decent C compiler freely available on the Internet. And it is a decent tool, thanks to all those who (obviously!) have put a lot of work into creating a stable, efficient, fast C compiler for the entire MSP family. Hitachi have hade a GNU based C compiler available for many years for many of their devices, it certainly has not hurt them! Cheers Harry -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]on Behalf Of Galen Seitz Sent: Saturday, October 26, 2002 1:12 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Mspgcc-users] JTAG MSP-FETP430IF status [email protected] said: > One day I shall be interested in hearing why TI (and Atmel, for that > matter) think that protecting parts of the JTAG command structure is a > useful idea. I believe in IP, and I believe there are some things > that users don't need to know about. But the fact they're willing to > share that information with some parties and not others is disturbing. > It seems to indicate a managerial structure that doesn't really > understand what a user wants, but rather a structure based on > unfounded fears. Do they really think some is going to clone the core > because someone knows how to read a register with JTAG? And if they > aren't going to tell, the least they could do is say why they think > they shouldn't. I have to chime in with a 'me too'. It really annoys me that some companies won't release this information. The absence of documentation for the debug interface can sometimes make it difficult to get a debugger running on new hardware, much less the fact that porting gdb becomes impossible. And what about those who aren't using an intel architecture machine for their debug host? Every time a vendor tells me they need to keep the interface proprietary, I show them section 7 of the Motorola CPU32 manual. It describes everything you need to know to use background debug mode. Publishing this info certainly didn't seem to hurt 683xx sales. Enough ranting for now. galen ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by: Influence the future of Java(TM) technology. Join the Java Community Process(SM) (JCP(SM)) program now. http://ads.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?sunm0004en _______________________________________________ Mspgcc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mspgcc-users
