FreeRTOS Threads in Eclipse Debug View With SEGGER J-Link and NXP S32 Design Studio

By default, the FreeRTOS threads do not show up with the SEGGER J-Link debug connection in the Eclipse based NXP S32 Design Studio IDE. But don’t worry —here is how to get it working with SEGGER J-Link debug connection:

FreeRTOS Threads in Eclipse Debug View

This article shows how to enable FreeRTOS thread aware debugging in the NXP S32 Design Studio (S32DS) for ARM. I’m using the version 2018.R1 build 180504:

By default, threads are not shown in the Debug view:

Debug View With no FreeRTOS Threads

The first thing is to add the following to the SEGGER debug configuration inside S32DS, under ‘Other options’:

-rtos GDBServer/RTOSPlugin_FreeRTOS

This command line will load the tread awareness plugin/DLL for the SEGGER GDB server. Because that plugin is not installed with S32DS, I have to add it to the IDE. The easiest way to get that plugin is to install the J-Link software from segger.com and copy that GDBServer folder where it has been installed it:

GDBServer Plugins

Then, copy that folder where S32DS has installed the SEGGER JLinkGDBServerCL.exe:

With this, when I debug a FreeRTOS application, I have all the FreeRTOS tasks shown in the Eclipse debug view, which makes debugging much, much easier  :

Happy threading!