I have recently received a PE Tracelink Debugger for use in a project which employs an MCF54418 Coldfire processor.
I have been able to set up a CodeWarrior Download connection for use with my Tracelink debugger. In the settings dialogue, I am presented with very little options with respect to tracing in the "Trace and Profile" tab. I am able to turn tracing on globally, via a Setting called "Enable Trace and Profile". I'm also able to select two user options and select whether I want a data trace or not. I am able to use the Tracelink debugger to download my program to my processor and to use it for normal debugging.
Collection of trace data seems to be unconditional. Whenever I run some code, say from one breakpoint to the next, a trace is collected. This is not necessarily what I want. My processor is connected to an industrial bus and I need to collect traces without disturbing the processor, so breaking is not an option.
Upload of trace data from the Tracelink to my PC works in reasonable time. If I use larger buffer size with the Tracelink debugger, currently I'm using 32 MBytes, Codewarrior takes about 15 minutes to analyse my trace. In this time I'm not able to continue debugging.
Even though I turned off data tracing, my trace contains "data" trace points, the value of which is always 0xffffffff.
Clearly, in this state of affairs tracing is not helpful at all.
This leads me to two questions:
- Is it possible to collect trace data conditionally? (Say by starting when code execution reaches some point A, stopping when it reaches point B)
- Is it possible to speed up the horribly slow trace analysis?
