Using HW debuggers

[free_electron]

I wonder how many were old timers, or new players that inherited older debug systems.

especially the real crufty old timers want the hardware debuggers. HP system 9000 based system HP16505 prototype analysers combined with reverse assemblers and code tracers. those things were everywhere in the 80's and 90's. Now only silicon makers still use those as they need to do the HAL work.

Once the HAL is stable then the 'softheads' can kludge around with 'emulation' and 'printf'

You may get the upper layers of the stack right on a pc. But one point you will have to flip bits in register in the chip. if you need to debug that bit flipping you WILL need a hardware debugger.

[photon]

Once the HAL is stable then the `hardheads' have fixed their bugs. 

[westfw]

Once the HAL is stable then the `hardheads' have fixed their bugs.

This is pretty key, I think.  On many embedded systems, the vast majority of the code is written at a much higher level than really benefits from a HW debugger (and benefits more from SW intelligence coded "around" things as a debugging tool.)  The idea of developing on a desktop-class system instead of actual hardware is just an extreme example of this: the hardware (and even low level SW) is so abstracted that it doesn't even need to be present to do significant debugging.