msp430 testbench provides a skeleton for helping to develop msp430 disassemblers and decompilers. It provides everything needed to develop minimal firmware that can be run on a device and inspect the behavior of individual instructions or sets of instructions. It does this by creating an extern function foo that can be defined in assembly and allows an easy place to set a break point on to then step through these instructions. It's intended to be used on a real device with mspdebug to step through execution.
- Install dependencies. Specifically do not install
mspdebugthrough the package manager because it is likely to be an old out of date version. Instead use the instructions in mspdebug setup.
sudo apt install binutils-msp430 gcc-msp430 gdb-msp430 msp430-libc msp430mcu
- Clone repository
git clone git@github.com:jrozner/msp430-testbench.git
The only file that should require modification is inc.S which defines a function foo that can be filled in with the assembly you'd like to test. You can use make to build the project which will produce an ELF as well as an IHEX file.
You can use mspdebug to flash the firmware onto the device using the prog testbench.elf command once it has connected to the device.
mspdebug won't automatically load symbols from an ELF and they are not present in the IHEX file to load. The Makefile will automatically generate a symbols file that can manually be loaded if desired using sym import symbols.
mspdebug doesn't resolve symbols for any of it's debugging or disassembly functionality so you'll need to identify the address of foo. You can do this one of two ways:
- Load the symbols as mentioned above and use
sym find foo - Use
msp430-readelf -s testbench.elf | grep foo
You can use setbreak <addr> to set a breakpoint at the listed address.
For stepping, inspecting, and other debugging functionality you should reference the mspdebug documentation itself available using man $HOME/mspdebug/share/man/man1/mspdebug.1.