How Can I Assemble ARM and Flash to STM32 in Linux?

Question

In this term, I have Microprocessors lectures and we're working on ARM Development with C/C++ and Assembly.

For a while I've been looking for an alternative for Keil uVision which is compatible with Linux Distributions (now using Arch) and able to assemble ARM and flash, but could not find anything. The most related platform was Eclipse but it does not look supports ARM Assembly and nothing that I read about flashing to STM32.

I don't want to work on Windows for ARM Development, is there any way to assemble ARM and flash it?

Answer 1

Very simple. Install STM32CubeIDE for linux and nucleotides board with your preferred STM32 uC. Follow the tutorials online

Answer 2

Be aware that Keil uses ARM's own compiler version 5 or 6 (current releases of Keil MDK support both v5 being ARM's legacy ARMCC, and 6 is based on clang/llvm). If you are following a course, and the course material is based on a different toolchain, you may encounter difficulties - or worse your tutor may not be able to mark your work. Just a consideration before you go off-piste.

Linux solutions are likely to be GNU toolchain based. An ARM GNU toolchain for Cortex-M can be found at: https://developer.arm.com/tools-and-software/open-source-software/developer-tools/gnu-toolchain/gnu-rm .

Flashing STM32 may either be done through a JTAG/SWD debugger usually using OpenOCD, or via the on-chip bootloader using a tool such as http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/man1/stm32flash.1.html . Your hardware debugger vendor may have their own Linux driver, so worth checking. Mbed compatable boards present as a USB mass-storage device and can be flashed simply by copying the image file drive.

Building and flashing on Linux is only half the battle however; you will presumably want to debug your code too. GDB with OpenOCD or a proprietary driver will of course work, but raw GDB is not a pleasant experience, and you might want to have a more "visual" debug solution. IDEs such as STM32CubeIDE integrate the toolchain, flashing and debugging - but is specific to STM32.