KDS is ignoring an assembler file

[mjbcswitzerland]

Hi Al

I have an assembler file in a project - say "myFile.s" - but KDS will not assemble it.

Looking at the properties of the file in KDS I get this in the Tool Chain Editor:

And it won't let anything else be selected as tool.

So I rename the file - to say "myFile.asm" - and now it recognises it and assembles it.

This means that I need to rename all *.s files to *.asm files to be able to build, but I am sure that this can't be true because often assembler files are names *.s.

How can I therefore tell KDS that it should recognise the *.s files ???

Thanks

Mark

[BlackNight]

Hi Mark,

unfortunately, this is an old CDT odd thing. I recommend to rename the *.s to *.S.

See Assembly Files in Eclipse CDT Projects | MCU on Eclipse  for information about this and how you can have *.s (lower case) recognized by the GNU assembler.

I hope this helps,

Erich

[mjbcswitzerland]

Thank you Erich

Adding the *.S file type to each KDS project seems too complicated (I would need a guide for every new project so that the setting doesn't get lost - I already need a guide because some settings always get lost when transferring projects and don't want to make this even longer....).

Therefore I renamed all *.s to *.S.

I notice that all GCC startup files in the KSDK are *.S (those for other compilers are *.s) and also assembler files in CMSIS are *.S. Presumably due to this problem.

In KSDK the mmCAU assember files are *.s and so get ignored by KDS. Possibly the librarian does accept *.s since they are usually built to a library before use(?)

Regards

Mark

[BlackNight]

Hi Mark,

yes, that's why all the assembly files for GNU assembler should use *.S. This includes the case if they are assembled for libraries (no difference here). So if you say that the mmCAU assembler files for GNU are with *.s, then they might work with a make file approach, but not with an Eclipse project without the change I have described in that article.

Erich

[mjbcswitzerland]

Erich

GNU assembler is not the problem since I mainly build with a GCC make file (more flexible than having to build in KDS) and didn't notice the *.s problem. It is only the KDS environment that has the issue.

I was surprised that the NXP/Freescale mmCAU assembler files can't be built in KDS (without renaming, or the custom project setup) but presumably they only ever used GCC directly to build the libraries.

Mark

[BlackNight]

Hi Mark,

it is really not a KDS, but a generic Eclipse CDT problem (many other Eclipse distributions from other vendors have that problem too). If building with make files you won't see that difference of file extension handling.

Erich

[mjbcswitzerland]

Understood.

However I do sometimes wonder why IBM released Eclipe to the OpenSource domain after investing $40M in it up to 2001. Although globally it is huge what it can do (if one needs to develop on multiple platforms in a hundred different languages) it must have cost 'normal' embedded developers billions in the meantime working round caveats that it had and still has (fortunately PCs are fast today since I remember at the beginning one needed to wait 10 minutes for it to start).

Before all the semiconductor manufacturers jumped on the band wagon of giving away free tool chains to entice users to decide on their products IAR (for example) was the norm and it was so easy because everything just worked - no searching for plug-ins or workarounds, or for a different driver that was finally reliable. One could focus on developing.

Now I have the feeling that I invest at least 2 weeks a year just to ensure that the (various) Eclipse based projects are always working - all this free stuff is not always cheap!

Mark