COMMON-DB: general documentation

This is the general documentation about common-db.

The last version of this document comes along with its source code, and is also canonically available from:

http://www.feelingofgreen.ru/shared/src/common-db/doc/documentation.html

A programmable debugging substrate, mostly geared to driving target devices by establishing control via on-chip debugging machinery through a JTAG (IEEE 1149.1) external port.

On-chip machinery control can be obtained either directly, through a JTAG adapter dongle, or through a network proxy, talking either the TAPCLIENT or RTLJTAG protocol.

Common-db itself can serve as a GDB remote target, by exposing its functionality through the GDB RSP protocol. Alternatively, it can expose the directly-attached JTAG target through its own TAPCLIENT protocol.

Common-db is designed to be capable to drive targets of different architecture, although only MIPS32 target is implemented.

Besides being a substrate, common-db includes a number of component applications, among which it includes:

• comdb, a command-line-driven debugger
• comgdbsrv, a GDB RSP remote target server
• flasher, a flash programming utility

Common-db is distributed in source code form, and can be obtained via its git repository:

git clone git://git.feelingofgreen.ru/common-db

However, this won't deal with the myriad of its dependencies, so an alternative, simpler path is using the desire package management substrate.

First, ensure that you have SBCL installed, and then issue the following commands:

curl -O http://feelingofgreen.ru/shared/src/desire/climb.sh
sh climb.sh -m common-db ~/desr

…which would take a while.

Please, report common-db bugs either by mail, to its author:

<_deepfire at feelingofgreen dot ru>

or, via the bugtracker:

http://feelingofgreen.ru:3000/projects/common-db/issues