Intro

My medium-term goal is to port my Silly Invaders game to a Real Time Operating System. Zephyr seems to be a good choice. It's open source, operates under the auspices of the Linux Foundation and has an active community with many developers from Intel committing the code.

They, unfortunately, do not support Tiva so I will need to port the OS before I can proceed with the application. I decided to buy the Freescale K64F board, which is supported, to familiarize myself a little with Zephyr before I start the porting work. The howto page for setting up K64F seems to be terribly complicated and requires a JTAG programmer. I summarize here a simpler way using cmsis-dap over USB.

Setup

I updated the MBED interface firmware following the instructions on this site. I also build my own OpenOCD from the head of the master branch using the following configuration options:

./configure --prefix=/home/ljanyst/Apps/openocd  --enable-cmsis-dap

Things may work fine with the stock firmware and the stock OpenOCD as well, but I did not try that. It's also probably a good idea to add the following udev rule so that you don't have to run things as root:

]==> cat /etc/udev/rules.d/99-openocd.rules
# frdm-k64f
ATTRS{idVendor}=="0d28", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0204", GROUP="plugdev", MODE="0660"
]==> sudo udevadm control --reload-rules

Hello world!

I use the ARM cross-compiler provided by Debian to compile Zephyr and then just copy the resulting binary to the MBED disk:

]==> cd samples/hello_world/nanokernel
]==> make BOARD=frdm_k64f CROSS_COMPILE=arm-none-eabi- CFLAGS=-O0
]==> cp outdir/zephyr.bin /media/ljanyst/MBED/

You can see the effects in the UART console using screen:

]==> screen /dev/ttyACM0 115200,cs8
Hello World!

I then run OpenOCD using the following script:

]==> cat k64f.cfg
set CHIPNAME k60
source [find target/kx.cfg]

$_TARGETNAME configure -event gdb-attach {
  halt
}

]==> openocd -s /home/ljanyst/Apps/openocd/share/openocd/scripts/ -c "interface cmsis-dap" -f k64f.cfg

And GDB:

]==> cat remote1.conf
target extended-remote :3333
monitor reset init
break main
continue
]==> arm-none-eabi-gdb  --command=remote1.conf outdir/zephyr.elf
...
Breakpoint 1 at 0x129c: file /home/ljanyst/Projects/zephyr/zephyr-project/samples/hello_world/nanokernel/src/main.c, line 37.
Note: automatically using hardware breakpoints for read-only addresses.

Breakpoint 1, main () at /home/ljanyst/Projects/zephyr/zephyr-project/samples/hello_world/nanokernel/src/main.c:37
37              PRINT("Hello World!\n");
(gdb) s
printk (fmt=0x2c90 "Hello World!\n") at /home/ljanyst/Projects/zephyr/zephyr-project/misc/printk.c:164
164             va_start(ap, fmt);
(gdb) s
165             _vprintk(fmt, ap);
(gdb) s
_vprintk (fmt=0x2c90 "Hello World!\n", ap=...) at /home/ljanyst/Projects/zephyr/zephyr-project/misc/printk.c:75
75              int might_format = 0; /* 1 if encountered a '%' */
(gdb) where
#0  _vprintk (fmt=0x2c90 "Hello World!\n", ap=...) at /home/ljanyst/Projects/zephyr/zephyr-project/misc/printk.c:75
#1  0x00001b46 in printk (fmt=0x2c90 "Hello World!\n") at /home/ljanyst/Projects/zephyr/zephyr-project/misc/printk.c:165
#2  0x000012a2 in main () at /home/ljanyst/Projects/zephyr/zephyr-project/samples/hello_world/nanokernel/src/main.c:37