Installer orbuculum avec Homebrew, Nix

Liens du projet

• Page d'accueil

Commandes et alias

• orbcat
• orbdump
• orbfifo
• orblcd
• orbmortem
• orbprofile
• orbstat
• orbtop
• orbtrace
• orbuculum
• orbzmq

Historique du projet

Orbuculum began around Single Wire Output and Serial Wire Viewer workflows for Cortex-M debugging. The upstream documentation says it originally supported only the SWO pin, then added support for parallel trace through ORBTrace mini and other interfaces such as JTrace.

The 2.2.0 README describes a larger internal shift from a legacy chip-like stream protocol to `orbflow`, an extensible packet-oriented protocol that represents probe data more compactly. It also notes added CPU families, improved client application handling, improved stats and timing, a simplified communications subsystem, and early ETM4 support.

Historique d'adoption

Orbuculum is niche but meaningful in embedded debugging. The upstream page lists support for Black Magic Debug Probe, SEGGER J-Link, generic USB TTL serial interfaces, FTDI high-speed serial interfaces, OpenOCD, PyOCD, ice40-HX8K and ECP5 parallel-trace boards, raw SWO files, and TCP sources that expose SWO.

The ORBTrace mini page links the hardware and software sides of the ecosystem: ORBTrace mini is an open-source debug and parallel trace interface for Cortex-M microcontrollers, and Orbuculum is the host suite used to exploit the captured trace stream.

Modes d'utilisation

Embedded developers run `orbuculum` as the mux that connects to a trace probe and exposes a network interface, then attach tools such as `orbcat` for ITM channel text, `orbdump` for raw SWO capture, `orbtop` for live activity views, `orbstat` for analysis and KCacheGrind output, `orbmortem` for post-mortem analysis, and `orbtrace` for ORBTrace FPGA configuration.

The practical use case is low-intrusion insight into firmware execution: text channels, program-counter samples, performance analysis, and crash reconstruction without relying only on breakpoints or serial logging.

Pourquoi les passionnés de paquets s'y intéressent

Orbuculum matters to package nerds because it packages a specialized embedded trace workflow as Unix-style command-line tools. The formula exposes many executables, each handling one part of trace capture, demultiplexing, viewing, statistics, or post-processing.

Chronologie

• 2023-06-30: The changelog records Orbuculum 2.1.0 with timestamping work, a move to Meson/Ninja, stream abstraction cleanup, option renames, ORBTrace SWO support, and reliability fixes.
• 2024-10-23: The release page for 2.2.0 describes orbflow protocol, ORBTrace Mini gateware 1.4.0 compatibility, FreeBSD support, and experimental ETM4 work.

Related projects

• Orbuculum is part of the Orbcode ecosystem alongside ORBTrace mini hardware. It also interoperates with common embedded debug tools such as Black Magic Probe, OpenOCD, PyOCD, and SEGGER J-Link.

Sources

• https://github.com/orbcode/orbuculum
• https://github.com/orbcode/orbuculum/blob/main/CHANGES.md
• https://orbcode.org/orbtrace-mini/
• https://orbcode.org/orbuculum/
• https://pyocd.io/docs/swo_swv.html