[dsdp-dd-dev] SPIRIT vs a new standard XML schema? (was Debug model and

["Spear, Aaron" <aaron_spear@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I changed the subject line to reflect the gist of the discussion a bit
more accurately as it is evolving...

> -----Original Message-----
> From: dsdp-dd-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx 
> [mailto:dsdp-dd-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Daniel 
> Jacobowitz
> Sent: Friday, June 02, 2006 10:21 AM
> To: Device Debugging developer discussions
> Subject: Re: [dsdp-dd-dev] Debug model and GDB?
> 
> I'm happy.  When I first encountered the description of what 
> you were doing, it seemed that we were coming from very 
> different directions, but a little communication is showing 
> that we're really moving the same way!

I hope so.  I don't want this to be a doomed effort from the start!  If
it is not going to work for the key players here architecturally due to
the nature of how their debuggers are set up, then we need to rethink
it.  The goal is widespread adoption and a low barrier to entry.  We had
for instance talked about creating as a part of DSDP free editors for
these files so that even small fry board vendors could put together
descriptions of their boards that will then work with any debugger that
supports their chip architecture.
 
> I thought I'd seen you say that relying on transformations of 
> the SPIRIT data had been a major source of problems, though?

Well, that information came from a colleague of mine in the Mentor EDA
world.  They are of course heavy duty consumers/generators of SPIRIT
information, using all that stuff that we will never use in a debugger.
I think that the issue there is the fact that there is possibly a
massive hierarchy of XML files containing various peripherals all
connected to various buses and such.  When you try and transform that
into another format that has a different sort of hierarchy and different
layout of information, you get into trouble using scripts.  I have not
really done any experimentation around this yet so see what the most
viable way of doing this is.  It may be that someone should just write a
dedicated translator from SPIRIT to another XML format, so that the
translation is done in code and thus anything is possible.  Then various
tools can write libraries that work on this standard format in whatever
language, and that work can be shared.

I am still hoping to solicit some other opinions on this issue, perhaps
from folks like ARM Ltd. Who are users of SPIRIT on the hw development
side of things with their ESL tools and such, and then have been talking
about using it for debug as well.  

The question is really should we use SPIRIT directly or a decoupled more
debugger centric standard? 

Aaron

--
Aaron Spear               aaron_spear@xxxxxxxxxx 
Debug Tools Architect/Staff Engineer
Mentor Graphics