Freescale/NXP Codewarrior - Why so many issues with Windows 10?

[AndersJ]

Does anyone know why Codewarrior V6.3 and V4.7
have so much trouble installing and running under Windows 10?

[nctnico]

Windows10 is different in some ways and it may break older applications. One of things that has been changed is the way GUI events are handled. For example: in Windows10 a user interface item may receive events before it is fully initialised.

[MosherIV]

No idea.
What I would suggest is to take every opportunity to tell Freescale/NXP how bad Eclipse is !
Hopefully, if they understand how bad Eclipse IDE is for embedded tools, they will stop using it as the base for their tools and go back to actually developing a decent tool 

[andersm]

Lots of older software weren't exactly developed with best practices in mind. Many also broke with the move to multi-core machines, eg. Renesas' old HEW IDE will just randomly crash unless forced to run on a single core.

[AndersJ]

What I would suggest is to take every opportunity to tell Freescale/NXP how bad Eclipse is !

I downloaded Codewarrior 11, hoping it might work in Windows 10.
* The complexity is huge. I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole.
* It seems to not support HCS12X
* It cannot import legacy HCS08 projects

Nobody from NXP has clarified what is needed for W10.
How can it be a problem to upgrade legacy well functioning tools to Windows 10?

I have a dozen products to support, currently in Windows XP.
XP is getting more and more problematic.
I am trying to upgrade to Windows 10, but it is not easy.

[AndersJ]

Does anyone have contact info to someone inside NXP
or in some other way related to NXP,
that might help me fix this?

[MosherIV]

If this is commercial, start by asking your electronics parts supplier for contact/support information for Freescale/NXP.

If this is hobby stuff, you pretty much limited to support forums on their web sites.

[nctnico]

NXP has a forum on their website which is monitored by their engineers. I think that is the best place to start asking questions. The older Motorola MCUs still sell well AFAIK so it is likely they get some attention. Be warned though that it takes some effort to figure out how the forum works.

[AndersJ]

I have tried their web site and their forum.
I get nowhere.
 
The question is simple, or so I believe.

What do I need to upgrade or purchase,
to continue using legacy Codewarrior tools
V 4.7 (or perhaps an upgrade)
and
V 6.3 (or perhaps an upgrade)
in a Windows 10 environment?

They say that it will not work for this or that reason.
I find it hard to believe their tools do not work in W10.

I must be misunderstanding something,
or asking the wrong questions,
but I cannot figure out what I do wrong.

Help is much appreciated,
AJ

[nctnico]

So NXP says that the old tools don't work under Windows 10 and yet you insist they should? Better listen to NXP if they say the tools are not supported under Windows 10. IMHO you better put energy into setting up a virtual machine with XP or Windows 7.

[AndersJ]

I am not insisting that OLD tools should work.
I do however expect them to support their own cpu
products with tools that work on todays platforms.

[james_s]

I wouldn't bother to support that turd of an OS either, it's not an upgrade. Don't they have a Linux toolchain? These are not consumer products, users are expected to set up a system meeting the requirements of the toolchain, not the other way around.

[nctnico]

I wouldn't bother to support that turd of an OS either, it's not an upgrade. Don't they have a Linux toolchain? These are not consumer products, users are expected to set up a system meeting the requirements of the toolchain, not the other way around.

It seems some versions of Codewarrior support Linux. However I think the toolchains for the older MCUs are Windows only and porting them will take a huge effort. Maybe one way to get around the problems in Codewarrior is to use a vanilla Eclipse-CDT install and have it use the toolchain if the IDE is that part which doesn't work. But this might take some work. A long time ago I wrote a wrapper around the PIC compiler so Eclipse-CDT could feed it the GCC options.

[MosherIV]

If Freescale/NXP will not support old legacy versions of Codewarrior, what version(s) do they support?

Freescale use to be quite generous just to get you to use their devices. I worked on a project where they gave us the MQX RTOS free of charge.

Will they give you a free upgrade to the current supported version?

Very few microcontroller tool chains are available for Linux, let alone supported.
Almost all comercial companies that do microcontroller development will be Windows based, so there is little for the microcontroller companies to gain by developing and supporting Linux development tools.

From what I can gather, hobbiests and Linux fans have cobbled together ARM development tool chain of some kind. Just like Linux based things, it is all command line based and really involved to get it working! Being a commercial, professional embedded systems developer, you can take those Linux tools and keep them. The commercial tools usual work and are easy to use, leaving you to get on with development and NOT trying to get the toolchain to work 

[james_s]

The last several jobs I've had were all Linux based on the development side and the products themselves. The last place I worked that had developers running Windows was Microsoft itself and that was ~15 years ago. Maybe things are different in other parts of the world but Linux is the defacto standard in the tech industry these days, followed by Mac.

[AndersJ]

If Freescale/NXP will not support old legacy versions of Codewarrior, what version(s) do they support?

That is precisely my question to NXP.
What tools do they offer that support the HCS12X and HCS08 microcontrollers on Windows 10?

They still haven't answered that .

[nctnico]

The last several jobs I've had were all Linux based on the development side and the products themselves. The last place I worked that had developers running Windows was Microsoft itself and that was ~15 years ago. Maybe things are different in other parts of the world but Linux is the defacto standard in the tech industry these days, followed by Mac.

Agreed. I'm running Linux as a primary OS for years and all of the software development I do is using Linux (and Eclipse as the IDE).

[MosherIV]

I am a professional embedded or realtime embedded developer, I have been doing this for 25years now. Every company I have been at uses Winodws.
Every microcontroller vendor I have work with (ST, NXP, TI, Microchip, Freescale, Intel, Nvidia and now Infineon) all primarily provide Windows toolchains. Some may support Linux.
Intel are the only vendor that have really good support for Linux but then they are not regarded as a supplier of microcontrollers.

[james_s]

At the last place I worked that did hardware, our products used Broadcom CPUs running Linux and AVR microcontrollers for ancillary tasks, all development was done under Linux. I was not even aware there was so much Windows stuff out there, when I was job hunting a couple years ago the tech job listings wanting Linux knowledge were probably 10:1 vs those wanting Windows knowledge.

[MosherIV]

Sorry AndersJ to take the thread down a Linux/Window debate.
Sorry to james and nctnico.

AndersJ, what volume of parts are we talking?
If it is high (>10,000) then you can mention that you are thinking of switching to STM8, Atmel or PIC, that will worry them and get them to take your (reasonable) question seriously.

[AndersJ]

Not to worry MosherIV.
Linux vs Windows was not a aspect I had considered.
Linux is however not an option until all other possibilities have been discarded.

The volume is definitely > 10K.
I had not considered the blackmail approach either.
I don't like to switch controllers,
but in the long run, if I cannot develop software, it may come to that.

[andersm]

NXP's own instructions for installing "classic" CW on 64-bit Win7 essentially boil down to running it in an XP virtual machine. Have you tried doing that?

[james_s]

Regardless of the OS, if you're going to make >10k of something surely you can set up a dedicated development machine running whatever OS you need, or if you're on a really tight budget run Win7 in a VM? Find the tools you like and then set up a machine specifically for running those tools, it's pretty common practice.

[AndersJ]

NXP's own instructions for installing "classic" CW on 64-bit Win7 essentially boil down to running it in an XP virtual machine. Have you tried doing that?

I made an attempt, and watched a youtube video showing it, but it was a mess.
I gave up.
Perhaps I approached it wrong.
Besides, I prefer W10, and have read somewhere that a virtual XP is not possible in W10.

If this is premature, please point me in the right direction.

[AndersJ]

Find the tools you like and then set up a machine specifically for running those tools, it's pretty common practice.

I do have a XP machine dedicated for these purposes.
I did however hope to eliminate it entirely.
It is slow and awkward,
and has difficulties accessing the fileserver on the local network.
It needs about half a minute to select a few dozen files, for copying.
I read something about XP and SMB no longer working.
Not sure what that means, or if it is related to this.

Perhaps its better to give up,
and make sure I have a couple of XP’s standing by in case of trouble.
It works reasonably well, but it’s irritating that I’m incapable of resolving these issues.