Building OpenOCD from Sources for Windows

Note

This document outlines how to build a binary of OpenOCD from its source files instead of downloading the pre-built binary. For a quick setup, users can download a pre-built binary of OpenOCD from Espressif GitHub instead of compiling it themselves (see Setup of OpenOCD for more details).

Note

All code snippets in this document are assumed to be running in an MSYS2 shell with the MINGW32 subsystem.

Install Dependencies

Install packages that are required to compile OpenOCD:

pacman -S --noconfirm --needed autoconf automake git make \
mingw-w64-i686-gcc \
mingw-w64-i686-toolchain \
mingw-w64-i686-libtool \
mingw-w64-i686-pkg-config \
mingw-w64-cross-winpthreads-git \
p7zip

Download Sources of OpenOCD

The sources for the ESP32-enabled variant of OpenOCD are available from Espressif's GitHub under https://github.com/espressif/openocd-esp32. These source files can be pulled via Git using the following commands:

cd ~/esp
git clone --recursive https://github.com/espressif/openocd-esp32.git

The clone of sources should be now saved in ~/esp/openocd-esp32 directory.

Downloading libusb

The libusb library is also required when building OpenOCD. The following commands will download a particular release of libusb and uncompress it to the current directory.

wget https://github.com/libusb/libusb/releases/download/v1.0.22/libusb-1.0.22.7z
7z x -olibusb ./libusb-1.0.22.7z

We now need to export the following variables such that the libusb library gets linked into the OpenOCD build.

export CPPFLAGS="$CPPFLAGS -I${PWD}/libusb/include/libusb-1.0"
export LDFLAGS="$LDFLAGS -L${PWD}/libusb/MinGW32/.libs/dll"

Build OpenOCD

The following commands will configure OpenOCD then build it.

cd ~/esp/openocd-esp32
export CPPFLAGS="$CPPFLAGS -D__USE_MINGW_ANSI_STDIO=1 -Wno-error"; export CFLAGS="$CFLAGS -Wno-error"
./bootstrap
./configure --disable-doxygen-pdf --enable-ftdi --enable-jlink --enable-ulink --build=i686-w64-mingw32 --host=i686-w64-mingw32
make
cp ../libusb/MinGW32/dll/libusb-1.0.dll ./src
cp /opt/i686-w64-mingw32/bin/libwinpthread-1.dll ./src

Once the build is completed, the OpenOCD binary will be placed in ~/esp/openocd-esp32/src/.

You can then optionally call make install. This will copy the OpenOCD binary to a user specified location.

• This location can be specified when OpenOCD is configured, or by setting export DESTDIR="/custom/install/dir" before calling make install.

• If you have an existing OpenOCD (from e.g., another development platform), you may want to skip this call as your existing OpenOCD may get overwritten.

Note

• Should an error occur, resolve it and try again until the command make works.

• If there is a submodule problem from OpenOCD, please cd to the openocd-esp32 directory and input git submodule update --init.

• If the ./configure is successfully run, information of enabled JTAG will be printed under OpenOCD configuration summary.

• If the information of your device is not shown in the log, use ./configure to enable it as described in ../openocd-esp32/doc/INSTALL.txt.

• For details concerning compiling OpenOCD, please refer to openocd-esp32/README.Windows.

• Don't forget to copy libusb-1.0.dll and libwinpthread-1.dll into OOCD_INSTALLDIR/bin from ~/esp/openocd-esp32/src.

Once make process is successfully completed, the executable of OpenOCD will be saved in ~/esp/openocd-esp32/src directory.

Full Listing

For greater convenience, all of commands called throughout the OpenOCD build process have been listed in the code snippet below. Users can copy this code snippet into a shell script then execute it:

pacman -S --noconfirm --needed autoconf automake git make mingw-w64-i686-gcc mingw-w64-i686-toolchain mingw-w64-i686-libtool mingw-w64-i686-pkg-config mingw-w64-cross-winpthreads-git p7zip
cd ~/esp
git clone --recursive https://github.com/espressif/openocd-esp32.git

wget https://github.com/libusb/libusb/releases/download/v1.0.22/libusb-1.0.22.7z
7z x -olibusb ./libusb-1.0.22.7z
export CPPFLAGS="$CPPFLAGS -I${PWD}/libusb/include/libusb-1.0"; export LDFLAGS="$LDFLAGS -L${PWD}/libusb/MinGW32/.libs/dll"

export CPPFLAGS="$CPPFLAGS -D__USE_MINGW_ANSI_STDIO=1 -Wno-error"; export CFLAGS="$CFLAGS -Wno-error"
cd ~/esp/openocd-esp32
./bootstrap
./configure --disable-doxygen-pdf --enable-ftdi --enable-jlink --enable-ulink --build=i686-w64-mingw32 --host=i686-w64-mingw32
make
cp ../libusb/MinGW32/dll/libusb-1.0.dll ./src
cp /opt/i686-w64-mingw32/bin/libwinpthread-1.dll ./src

# # optional
# export DESTDIR="$PWD"
# make install
# cp ./src/libusb-1.0.dll $DESTDIR/mingw32/bin
# cp ./src/libwinpthread-1.dll $DESTDIR/mingw32/bin

Next Steps

To carry on with debugging environment setup, proceed to section Configuring ESP32 Target.