dinuxbg / gnupru

GCC and Binutils port for the TI PRU I/O processor
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Best areas for helping with open source PRU development tools. #29

Closed Electron752 closed 3 years ago

Electron752 commented 6 years ago

Hi,

I've been using the PRU in the BBB for awhile now. All in asm using the pasm tool. I'm interested in possibly helping here and just wanted to check first what would be good areas to contribute to.

Two areas that seem interesting is finishing gdb and cleaning up the debian packages. These are areas I can probably contribute to quite easily and I've been unable to find a working software debugger for the PRU on the web. I know TI does support hardware JTAG based debugging but it's a bit expensive and a software tool would be great as a first try debugging tool.

BTW, I am a bit curious of the purpose of GCC though. Most of the strength of the PRU is the single cycle execution, predictability, and specialization of the instruction set and that often requires writing in ASM to leverage.

dinuxbg commented 6 years ago

Hi,

You are welcome to contribute to any area you find interesting. Here are a few ideas:

As for the purpose of GCC, at the very least it was fun to port :) Also, you have Binutils assembler and linker if you prefer assembly programming. And you can always take the best of both worlds by mixing C and ASM: https://github.com/dinuxbg/pru-gcc-examples/blob/master/ov7670-cam/pru/ov7670.c#L141 . Inline assembly in GCC is light years ahead of TI CGT.

Regards, Dimitar

Electron752 commented 6 years ago

Awsome. Sounds like alot of things for me to pick from.

I'll get back with you once I make some progress.

dinuxbg commented 3 years ago

Guidelines were given, so I consider this closed.