NOTICE: The project has currently not an active maintainer. Feel free to contribute and discus in issue #826
First, you have to know there are several boards supported by the software. Those boards use a chip to translate from USB to JTAG commands. The chip is called stlink and there are two versions:
- STLINKv1, present on STM32VL discovery kits,
- STLINKv2, present on STM32L discovery and later kits.
Two different transport layers are used:
- STLINKv1 uses SCSI passthru commands over USB
- STLINKv2 and STLINKv2-1 (seen on nucleo boards) uses raw USB commands.
Windows users can download v1.3.0 from the releases page.
Mac OS X users can install from homebrew or download v1.3.0 from the releases page.
Debian Linux users can install it via the stlink-tool package repository
Ubuntu Linux users can install it via the stlink-tool package repository
Arch Linux users can install from the repository
Alpine Linux users can install from the repository
Fedora users can install from repository
RedHat/CentOS 7 users can install from EPEL repository
Gentoo Linux users can install from the official portage repository
FreeBSD users can install from freshports
OpenBSD users need to install from source.
When there is no executable available for your platform or you need the latest (possible unstable) version you need to compile yourself. This is explained in the compiling manual.
To run the gdb server:
$ make && [sudo] ./st-util
There are a few options:
./st-util - usage:
-h, --help Print this help
-vXX, --verbose=XX Specify a specific verbosity level (0..99)
-v, --verbose Specify generally verbose logging
-s X, --stlink_version=X
Choose what version of stlink to use, (defaults to 2)
-1, --stlinkv1 Force stlink version 1
-p 4242, --listen_port=1234
Set the gdb server listen port. (default port: 4242)
-m, --multi
Set gdb server to extended mode.
st-util will continue listening for connections after disconnect.
-n, --no-reset
Do not reset board on connection.
The STLINKv2 device to use can be specified in the environment
variable STLINK_DEVICE in the format <USB_BUS>:<USB_ADDR>.
Then, in your project directory, someting like this... (remember, you need to run an ARM gdb, not an x86 gdb)
$ arm-none-eabi-gdb fancyblink.elf
...
(gdb) tar extended-remote :4242
...
(gdb) load
Loading section .text, size 0x458 lma 0x8000000
Loading section .data, size 0x8 lma 0x8000458
Start address 0x80001c1, load size 1120
Transfer rate: 1 KB/sec, 560 bytes/write.
(gdb)
...
(gdb) continue
You may reset the chip using GDB if you want. You'll need to use `target extended-remote' command like in this session:
(gdb) target extended-remote localhost:4242
Remote debugging using localhost:4242
0x080007a8 in _startup ()
(gdb) kill
Kill the program being debugged? (y or n) y
(gdb) run
Starting program: /home/whitequark/ST/apps/bally/firmware.elf
Remember that you can shorten the commands. tar ext :4242 is good enough
for GDB.
If you need to send a hard reset signal through NRST pin, you can use the following command:
(gdb) monitor jtag_reset
You can run your firmware directly from SRAM if you want to. Just link it at 0x20000000 and do
(gdb) load firmware.elf
It will be loaded, and pc will be adjusted to point to start of the code, if it is linked correctly (i.e. ELF has correct entry point).
The GDB stub ships with a correct memory map, including the flash area.
If you would link your executable to 0x08000000 and then do
(gdb) load firmware.elf
then it would be written to the memory.
Example to read and write option bytes (currently writing only supported for STM32G0 and STM32L0)
./st-flash --debug --reset --format binary --flash=128k read option_bytes_dump.bin 0x1FFF7800 4
./st-flash --debug --reset --format binary --flash=128k write option_bytes_dump.bin 0x1FFF7800
Q: My breakpoints do not work at all or only work once.
A: Optimizations can cause severe instruction reordering. For example, if you are doing something like `REG = 0x100;' in a loop, the code may be split into two parts: loading 0x100 into some intermediate register and moving that value to REG. When you set up a breakpoint, GDB will hook to the first instruction, which may be called only once if there are enough unused registers. In my experience, -O3 causes that frequently.
Q: At some point I use GDB command `next', and it hangs.
A: Sometimes when you will try to use GDB next command to skip a loop,
it will use a rather inefficient single-stepping way of doing that.
Set up a breakpoint manually in that case and do continue.
Q: Load command does not work in GDB.
A: Some people report XML/EXPAT is not enabled by default when compiling GDB. Memory map parsing thus fail. Use --enable-expat.
Some features are missing from the texane/stlink project and we would like you to
help us out if you want to get involved:
- Control programming speed (See #462)
- OTP area programming (See #202)
- EEPROM area programming (See #318)
- Protection bits area reading (See #346)
- MCU hotplug (See #449)
- Writing options bytes (region) (See #458)
- Instrumentation Trace Macro (ITM) Cell (See #136)
- Writing external memory connected to an STM32 controller (e.g Quad SPI NOR flash) (See #412)
There is seen a problem sometimes where a flash loader run error occurs and is resolved after mass-erase of the flash:
2015-12-09T22:01:57 INFO src/stlink-common.c: Successfully loaded flash loader in sram
2015-12-09T22:02:18 ERROR src/stlink-common.c: flash loader run error
2015-12-09T22:02:18 ERROR src/stlink-common.c: run_flash_loader(0x8000000) failed! == -1
Issue related to this bug: #356
It is possible that the STM32 flash is write protected, the st-flash tool will show something like this:
st-flash write prog.bin 0x8000000
2017-01-24T18:44:14 INFO src/stlink-common.c: Loading device parameters....
2017-01-24T18:44:14 INFO src/stlink-common.c: Device connected is: F1 High-density device, id 0x10036414
2017-01-24T18:44:14 INFO src/stlink-common.c: SRAM size: 0x10000 bytes (64 KiB), Flash: 0 bytes (0 KiB) in pages of 2048 bytes
As you can see, it gives out something unexpected like
Flash: 0 bytes (0 KiB) in pages of 2048 bytes
st-info --probe
Found 1 stlink programmers
serial: 303030303030303030303031
openocd: "\x30\x30\x30\x30\x30\x30\x30\x30\x30\x30\x30\x31"
flash: 0 (pagesize: 2048)
sram: 65536
chipid: 0x0414
descr: F1 High-density device
Try to remove the write protection (probably only possible with ST Link Utility from ST itself).
Issue related to this bug: #545
- The semantic versioning scheme is used. Read more at semver.org
- When creating a pull request, please open first a issue for discussion of new features. Bugfixes don't need a discussion.
The stlink library and tools are licensed under the BSD license. The flashloaders/stm32l0x.s and flashloaders/stm32lx.s source files are licensed under the GPL-2+.