[bsder]

On embedded, debuggers almost never work until you get to really expensive ones.

In addition, debuggers tend to obscure the failure because they turn on all the hardware which tends to make bugs go away if they are related to power modes.

One of my "best" debuggers for embedded was putting an interactive interpreter over a serial interface on an interrupt so I could query the state of things when a device woke up even if it was hung--effectively a run time injectable "printf".

Crude, but it could trace down obscure bugs that were rare because the device would stay in the failure mode.

The bigeest problem was maintaining the database of code so that we knew exactly what build was on a device. We had to hash and track the universe.

[vlovich123]

I’ve worked with many M3s and M4s and some Cypress microchips and the JTAG debuggers always worked fine as far as I recall. There were some vendors that liked to force you to buy really expensive ancillary HW but a) there was plenty of OSS that worked fairly well b) you could pick which vendor you went with.

[bsder]

All of those chips you mentioned will turn on all the units at full power when you connect a debugger to them.

And the OSS stuff never works correctly. I wind up debugging the OSS stuff more than my own hardware. And I've used a LOT of OSS (to the point that I wrote software to use a Beaglebone as my SWD debugger to work around all the idiocies--both commercial and OSS).