Cannot halt processor on LPC1768 with LPCOpen ethernet demos

[mircodemarchi]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to connect an mbed NXP LPC1768 in ethernet with FreeRTOS. I'm using MCUXpresso 11.1.2, but I did the same tests with MCUXpresso 10.3.0 and 10.2.1. The operating system that I use is macOS Catalina, but I did a test also with MCUXpresso on Ubuntu 18.04 virtual machine. The firmware of the mbed NXP LPC1768 is the last version (141212) taken from the official Mbed website (os.mbed.com/handbook/Firmware-LPC1768-LPC11U24). The debug configuration that I use is the LinkServer C/C++ (NXP Semiconductors) MCU Application.

Firstly I tried to run some demo projects with an ethernet interaction taken from LPCOpen. All the projects build without errors or warning, but I'm not able to make it works. The freertos_blinky project works well: I can run and debug it. However the periph_ethernet, webserver, webserver_freertos, lwip_tcpecho_freertos, lwip_tcpecho_sa and in essence every demo project with an ethernet communication start to run, but when I try to stop or pause the execution this is the message error that I catch and the debug session closes: 

Then if I try to rerun the project the "Cannot halt processor" console error reappeared: 

After this error I become no longer able to test any project on the LPC1768 with MCUXpresso, because if I try to run any project, the "Cannot halt processor" error will return.

The only way to recover the LPC platform is to use MBED Studio to build a .bin execution file, and load it in the device driver of LPC1768. After power-cycle the board by disconnecting and reconnecting the cable, I can still use MCUXpresso to run projects.

I also tried an ethernet demo project with mbed-os, using Mbed Studio 1.3.0.4, and in particular the mbed-os-example-sockets project. With Mbed everything works well: I can run codes and I see the platform successfully connected in ethernet and exchanging messages over the network. Therefore it's not a problem of the board...

Why can't I correctly run a project with an ethernet connection in MCUXpresso? Why did I obtain this "Cannot halt processor" error? 

Thank you, best regards

[mircodemarchi]

After some debugging, I understand that the "Cannot halt processor" error is caused by the Chip_ENET_Init() function call. I have found that the Chip_ENET_Init() problem is already discussed in this post: Ethernet-init-problem-with-LPCopen-and-CMSIS. Therefore check the post for the continuation of the discussion.