Debug Perspective in Vitis IDE - 2023.1 English

Vitis Unified Software Platform Documentation: Embedded Software Development (UG1400)

Document ID
UG1400
Release Date
2023-07-26
Version
2023.1 English

About Debug Perspective

Perspective is a method that the Vitis IDE uses to organize the window views to help you accomplish current tasks. The common perspectives are:

  • Debug Perspective: the perspective that groups multiple views for debugging
  • Design Perspective: the default perspective for code editing
  • Performance Analysis Perspective: the perspective that groups multiple views for performance analysis

Launching Debug Perspective

You can use any of the following methods to launch Debug Perspective

  • On the right side of the tool bar, click the Debug Perspective icon
  • Click menu > Window > Debug Perspective

Layout of Debug Perspective

The following image shows the default layout of Debug Perspective. You can customize the position of each view by using the dragging and dropping.
Figure 1. Layout of Debug Perspective

Debug View

The debug view shows the processes for the current debug session and it is called 'stacks'.

Figure 2. Debug View

Variables View

The variables view shows the local variables of the current function.

For global variables, please use the Expressions View.

Figure 3. Variable View

Breakpoints View

The breakpoints view shows the breakpoints of all applications in the current workspace.
Figure 4. Breakpoint View

You can click the three dots icon on the upper right corner to get more features in this view, such as add line breakpoint, add function breakpoint, add event breakpoint, add watchpoint, and so on.

You can right click a breakpoint, select breakpoint properties to setup advanced use cases, such as condition, actions, and so on.

Setting breakpoints automatically at all exceptions handlers from IDE may not be feasible because the handlers may not have standard names like main/exit.

Expressions View

The expressions view can show the results of user input expressions.

To view the value of global variables of C/C++ applications, please add the global variable name in the expressions view.

Figure 5. Expressions View

Registers View

The registers view shows the processor registers.

Note: Register view contents are sensitive to the processor selection. Selecting different processors will show different contents. Enabling Pin to Debug Context on the upper-right corner can keep the contents while switching the processor selection.
Figure 6. Register View