AVaRICE is a program which interfaces the GNU Debugger GDB with the AVR JTAG ICE available from Atmel. There are some third party clones of the Atmel jtagice available for purchase via the web for prices much less than the Atmel's offering.
In recent times, GCC added support for the AVR series of microcontrollers. This has been quite the boon for those of us who write embedded applications for processors with "leaner" architectures. Recently, Atmel announced the availability of a JTAG box for the AVR. Until now, there was no way to interface to this device with GDB.
AVaRICE runs on a POSIX machine and connects to gdb via a TCP socket and communicates via gdb's "serial debug protocol". This protocol allows gdb to send commands like "set/remove breakpoint" and "read/write memory".
AVaRICE translates these commands into the Atmel protocol used to control the AVR JTAG ICE. Connection to the AVR JTAG ICE is via a serial port on the POSIX machine.
Because the GDB <---> AVaRICE connection is via a TCP socket, the
two programs do not need to run on the same machine. In an office environment,
this allows a developer to debug a target in the lab from the comfort of
their cube (or even better, their home!)
Please watch the SF.net project area for details.
AVaRICE 2.3 is considered a stable release.
This release does not support the jtagice-mkII from Atmel. Support for the mkII is planned for the next stable release. The adventerous can look in cvs for how that is comming along.
AVaRICE is being used sucessfully to debug many serious, large commercial applications: 400 c/c++ files, 20000 non-commentary source lines (NCSL) of code.
Supported Platforms (basically means someone sent in patches and said "this makes it work for me."):
Avarice-2.3 has been released. Go to the file download area
Old releases (only here for historical purposes, not recommended for use or supported in any way):
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Twice daily, a snapshot is taken from the cvs repository. The contents of this tarball are exactly the same as what is obtained from an anonymous checkout from CVS. We provide this since sourceforge has been having serious problems which have caused anonymous CVS access to become virtually impossible.
For those with a slow link to the net, it may be faster to download the snapshot then to do the anonymous check. The end result is the same since you can still do things like 'cvs update' or 'cvs diff -u'.
GDB >= 6.0 is the preferred version of gdb.
GDB-5.3 has known bugs related to AVR that can cause it to seg fault. The bugs have been found and fixed in 6.0.
To subscribe to the list, go to the subscription page .
Once you have joined the list, messages may be posted to avarice-user@lists.sourceforge.net .
Suggestions, bug reports (or even better.... bug fixes) are always welcomed. Please email them to the mailing list.
AVaRICE is written and owned by Scott Finneran and is freely distributable under the terms and conditions of the GNU GPL .
Page Last Updated: Tue Dec 7 11:38:47 PST 2004