Nios® II Software Developer Handbook

ID 683525
Date 8/28/2023
Public
Document Table of Contents

9.4. Debugging Nios® II ISRs

You can debug an ISR by setting breakpoints in the ISR. The debugger completely halts the processor on reaching a breakpoint. In the meantime, however, the other hardware in your system continues to operate. Therefore, it is inevitable that other interrupts are ignored while the processor is halted. You can use the debugger to step through the ISR code, but the status of other interrupt-driven device drivers is generally invalid by the time you return the processor to normal execution. You must reset the processor to return the system to a valid state.

With the IIC, the ipending register (ctl4) is masked to all zeros during single-stepping. This masking prevents the processor from servicing interrupts that are asserted while you single-step through code. As a result, if you try to single-step through a part of the exception handling system that reads the ipending register, such as alt_irq_entry() or alt_irq_handler(), the code does not detect any pending interrupts. This issue does not affect debugging software exceptions. You can set breakpoints in your ISR code (and single-step through it), because the interrupt funnel has already used ipending to determine which device caused the hardware interrupt.