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RP2040+W5500 = Ethernet Swindle

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 I was not really happy with the CH32V307 Ethernet Version. It is a all-included & cheap version. But it's only 10 Mbps and there is not enough flash/sram to comfortably host swindle. The ESP32S3 wifi based version is sort of working, but the performances are not that great and i had to hack a lot to make rust + esp + cmake based project playing nice together. So here comes the new challenger : W5500 + RP2040 The RP2040 is probably the best host for swindle : - Clock accurate  SWD/RVSWD IO through PIO - Plenty of RAM/Flash - Top notch datasheet The W5500 is a nice UDP/TCP over SPI adapter. The MAC is completely managed by the chip so there is no latency bottleneck due to SPI. Since i'm in the "playing with agent" phase, i rewrote the w5500 driver with the help of deepseek and gemini to be very event driven and not polling driven. The agents  fixed a couple of subtle bugs ( & created some) It works, still need a bit of love.  Mega chain : a GD32F303 debugging ...
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ESP32S3 mini

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 A quick port to support the ESP32S3 mini over Wifi. The pic below is a ESP32S3 debugging a bluepill board (still over wifi) Github page
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Swindle Preview 6

New year version  Preview 6 https://github.com/mean00/swindle/releases Ethernet version for the CH32V307 eval board RTT & serial fixes Updated blackmagic engine Breakpoints in Flash for CH32V1/2 
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Ethernet Swindle and gcc vs clang

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 There will be soon a new flavor of the swindle : The ethernet swindle It's starting to work nicely, utltimately the goal is to use the CH32V208 that is available for ~ 4$ on aliexpress. It's basically a CH32V307 without HS usb and without fpu,  same flash, same ram (more on that later).  LWIP is pretty big and i'm running short on both flash & ram. While looking into it, i discovered a nice option that gcc has and clang does not "-msave-restore" Since the Riscv does not have stmia/ldmia style instruction, it must push and pop all registers one at a time when entering/exiting a function. That is consuming a lot of code space for short functions. The -msave-restore creates function to save/restore , all possible variants and call them instead of manually pushing/popping registers. Let's give it a try, baseline is clang + hw FPU: Clang + HW FPU    255 508   (+0kB) Clang + no FPU       257 632  (+2KB) Clang + FPU+LTO  232...
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SW breakpoint for the CH32V203 (and similar)

  The WCH doc clearly  states the QingKev4 b does not have hardware breakpoints. We saw that a bit earlier. The CH32V203 among others is a QingKeV4 b . I've added support for flash software breakpoint for the CH32V[2/3]xx to swindle. It is still a bit experimental. When such software breakpoints are used, under the hood the following happens : - Identify the page where the breakpoint is ( 256 bytes page for the CH32V[2/3]xx - Read the page - Store the 16 bits where the breakpoint is - Replace those 16 bits by a "ebreak" opcode - Erase the page - Write the modified page When removing the breakpoint the same thing happens except we put back the original opcode. It is a bit slow, but usable. The main drawback is that it will speed up flash wearing a lot. The framework is in place, if and when need it will be easy to add such functions to other chips. The main difference with other flashing operations are : - we want to use the smaller size possible. Usually we aim a bit hig...
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Swindle : Preview 5 out

 After a long time, Swindle preview 5 is out, small changelog - Updated to latest blackmagic engine - Preliminary support for RP2350 (host and target) - Support for voltage translators - RTT support (with auto setup) - Better cortex  register support (including trustzone ones) - Overall better stability, it should freeze much less often - and of course continued support for CH32V30x (host and target) 
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Swindle : RP2350 Coming soon (as host)

Now that the prices are coming down, making your own debug probe with a RP2350 is almost there. Don't expect big changes, the RP2040 is already powerful enough. Nb: since the blackmagic already supports the RP2350, it is already included
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