December 20, 2010 -- ARM announced today the release of the ARM Development Studio 5 (DS-5) v5.3, and the commercial availability of the DS-5 Linux Edition. DS-5 accelerates Linux and Android native code development by providing a powerful and intuitive development environment, including source editing, compilation, debug and performance analysis tools.

DS-5 is now available in two packages:

DS-5 Application Edition targets application development using a low-cost Ethernet or USB connection to the target. DS-5 Linux Edition extends this functionality with support for platform bring-up, kernel and driver development. The debug connection to the target is provided by a DSTREAM debug and trace unit.

The DS-5 device configuration database contains implementation details for supported ARM processor-based ASSPs, including JTAG interface, resets, peripheral registers and trace architecture. The current list of supported platforms includes Atmel, Freescale, Marvell, NXP, ST, and TI catalog devices. All the user needs to do is select the target device from a pull-down list and connect to it. More devices will be added in future DS-5 releases.

DS-5 speeds up platform bring-up by providing access to coprocessor registers and enabling the use of hardware breakpoints and data access watchpoints. DS-5 also supports instruction trace to simplify the debug of timing-related software bugs and analyse performance-critical code.

When debugging kernel-space code, DS-5 provides information on kernel threads, processes and loadable modules. This is complemented by the display of memory-mapped peripheral registers as they appear in the ASSP's documentation, which removes the need to continuously check device datasheets when doing driver development.

For DS-5 Application Edition users, this release adds new functionality in the Streamline Performance Analyzer:

Android native application and library profiling Support for Cortex-A9 processor targets running Linux SMP. Streamline shows core allocation for each thread over time, which simplifies code balancing and enables more efficient use of the target's resources

Availability