Building OpenOCD

OpenFacts, the Open Source Knowledge Database

The OpenOCD Wiki entries always document the latest version of OpenOCD. You can download the current SVN version with SVN client of your choice from the following repositories:

 svn://svn.berlios.de/openocd/trunk

 http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/openocd/trunk

Using the SVN command line client, you could use the following command to fetch the latest version (make sure there is no (non-svn) directory called "openocd" in the current directory):

 svn checkout svn://svn.berlios.de/openocd/trunk

Building the OpenOCD requires a recent version of the GNU autotools. On my build system, I'm using autoconf 2.13 and automake 1.9. For building on Windows, you have to use Cygwin. Make sure that your PATH environment variable contains no other locations with Unix utils (like UnxUtils) - these can't handle the Cygwin paths, resulting in obscure dependency errors (This is an observation I've gathered from the logs of one user - correct me if I'm wrong).

You further need the appropriate driver files, if you want to build support for a FTDI FT2232 based interface:

ftdi2232: libftdi (http://www.intra2net.com/opensource/ftdi/)
ftd2xx: libftd2xx (http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/D2XX.htm)
When using the Amontec JTAGkey, you have to get the drivers from the Amontec homepage (www.amontec.com), as the JTAGkey uses a non-standard VID/PID.

Please note that the ftdi2232 variant (using libftdi) isn't supported under Cygwin. You have to use the ftd2xx variant (using FTDI's D2XX) on Cygwin.

In general, the D2XX driver provides superior performance (several times as fast), but has the draw-back of being binary-only - though that isn't as worse, as it isn't a kernel module, only a user space library.

To build OpenOCD (on both Linux and Cygwin), use the following commands:

./bootstrap

Bootstrap generates the configure script, and prepares building on your system.

./configure

Configure generates the Makefiles used to build OpenOCD

make

Make builds the OpenOCD, and places the final executable in ./src/

The configure script takes several options, specifying which JTAG interfaces should be included:

--enable-parport
--enable-parport_ppdev
--enable-amtjtagaccel
--enable-ft2232_ftd2xx (*)
--enable-ft2232_libftdi
--with-ftd2xx=/path/to/d2xx/

(*)Using the latest D2XX drivers from FTDI and following their installation instructions, I had to use --enable-ft2232_libftd2xx for the OpenOCD to build properly

If you want to access the parallel port using the PPDEV interface you have to specify both the '--enable-parport'- AND the '--enable-parport_ppdev'-option since the '--enable-parport_ppdev' option actually is an option to the parport driver (see http://forum.sparkfun.com/viewtopic.php?t=3795 for more info).

Cygwin users have to specify the location of the FTDI D2XX package. This should be an absolute path containing no spaces. Linux users should copy the various parts of the D2XX package to the appropriate locations, i.e. /usr/include, /usr/lib.

This page has been written as part of the Open On-Chip Debugger project.