ESP8266 Community Forum

- Fri Oct 10, 2014 6:55 am #1508

The Xtensa core used in the ESP8266 has support in OpenOCD. OpenOCD works with common ARM JTAG units. JTAG is the same everywhere so these 'ARM' JTAGs should work on the ESP8266 too.

JTAG has several advantages. It can use several different schemes to program the flash chip. JTAG can also provide source level debugging and single step. OpenOCD is already integrated with gdb.

As soon as someone get some hardware it would interesting to see what you can do with OpenOCD.

Could you point me to the version of OpenOCD you found which supports Xtensa cores? I only find some old discussions about it on http://lists.linux-xtensa.org/pipermail/openocd-xtensa/
The hardware is here on my table , just need OpenOCD now

- Fri Oct 10, 2014 9:22 am #1511 none of the version between 0.1.0 and 0.8.0, they simply don't know any tensilica nor xtensa target.

It could be easier to use the "Xtensa OCD Daemon 8.0.1" (the one provided with the VM) and that provided SDK to create own control driver, as said here :

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=12&p=1400&hilit=jtag#p1400

I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter ...
I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me.

- Tue Oct 14, 2014 3:25 am #1593 Yes thats also what was told to me at the openocd irc channel.
Still wondering if johnsmirl just misread/misunderstood something or if he found openocd with xtensa support somewhere...

Would be great to have debugging on the ESP and if I knew that beforehand that no official openocd support for xtensa exists I wouldn't had
put this expensive FT2232H on my devboard (And ordered the parts) . But well thats alone my fault I didn't checked that before and took some forum claims for serious ....

- Tue Oct 14, 2014 6:52 am #1612 I had found a web page describing OpenOCD on xtensa. I had not tried because I had no hardware at that time. I can ask on the xtensa mailing list and see what they say.

Where I get my modules