This short tutorial shows how to compile the Dhrystone and Whetstone benchmarks and execute them on an STMicroelectronics STM8A-DISCOVERY STM8AF board (MB1036B), with an extra WaveShare RS232 board or Hobby Components HCCABL0015 USB to RS232 TTL Serial Interface Cable (similar RS232 boards and USB to TTL cables are available by many vendors). The author used a Debian GNU/Linux system, but the tutorial should work for other Linux distributions, *BSD or other Unices.
The tools we use are
- The SDCC compiler, version 3.5.0 or later to compile C programs for the STM8.
- stm8flash, to write programs onto devices.
Hardware setup
The STM8A-DISCOVERY board is connected to the host computer via a USB cable for power and to write the demo onto the board using the integrated stlink. We will be using pin 1 on the LIN jumper header for serial communication, and thus need to remove the jumper there. When using the WaveShare RS232 board, we connect its VCC to +5V on the Discovery, GND to GND, TxIN to pin 1 on the LIN jumper header. The USB connection stays on for power supply. If we use the Hobby Components HCCABL0015 instead, the USB connection should be removed after writing the demo on the board, before connecting the HCCABL0015. We connect the red wire to +5V, the black wire to GND, the white wire to pin 1 on the LIN jumper header.
Get SDCC
Depending on your operating system there might be an easy way to install SDCC 3.5.0 or newer using a package system or similar (e.g. apt-get install sdcc on Debian). While SDCC 3.4.0 should be sufficient for this tutorial, you might want to try a newer version in case you encounter any bugs. In particular, SDCC 3.4.0 has an issue with the library search path; this can be worked around by explicitly specifying the path to the standard library when linking.
SDCC binaries or a source tarball can be downloaded from its website.
Get stm8flash
The stm8flash source can be found at its GitHub location, where there is also a download link for a zip archive of the sources. To compile it, a C compiler, such as gcc, pkg-config and libusb need to be installed. Unzip the archive (e.g. using unzip stm8flash-master.zip) change into the directory stm8flash-master and type make. In case there are any errors, such as header files not found, check that pkg-config and development files for libusb are installed.
Get Dhrystone
Download a version of Dhrystone adapted for use with SDCC and the MB1036B board.
Download, and unpack it using tar -xzf dhrystone-stm8af5288-usart3-sdcc-3.6.0.tar.gz, change into the directory dhrystone-stm8af5288-usart3-sdcc-3.6.0.
You can then compile dhrystone by typing make. In the end there should be a file dhrystone.ihx.
A bit of custom code was necessary to make Dhrystone run using SDCC on the STM8AF board. See the file dhry.h and portme.c for details. The file portme.c basically combines clock() from the timer demo and putchar() from the serial demo.
Put Dhrystone onto the board
Assuming stm8flash and dhrystone.ihx are in the same directory, the board is attached through the integrated ST-Link/v2 device, ./stm8flash -c stlinkv2 -p stm8af5288 -w dhrystone.ihx will write Dhrystone onto the board. Dhrystone will run and report its results via USART3. You can see them by attaching a nullmodem cable to the USART3 on the board, and using a terminal program configured for 9600 baud, no parity, 8 bits, 1 stop bit and no flow control. They should look like this (the benchmark numbers may vary depending on the SDCC version used to compile Dhrystone):
Dhrystone Benchmark, Version 2.1 (Language: C)
Program compiled with 'register' attribute
Please give the number of runs through the benchmark:
Execution starts, 20000 runs through Dhrystone
Execution ends
Final values of the variables used in the benchm should be: 5
Bool_Glob: 1
should be: 1
Ch_1_Glob: A
should be: A
Ch_2_Glob: B
should be: B
Arr_1_Glob[8]: 7
should be: 7
Arr_2_Glob[8][7]: 20010
should be: Number_Of_Runs + 10
Ptr_Glob->
Ptr_Comp: 5131
should be: (implementation-dependent)
Discr: 0
should be: 0
Enum_Comp: 2
should be: 2
Int_Comp: 17
should be: 17
Str_Comp: DHRYSTONE PROGRAM, SOME STRING
should be: DHRYSTONE PROGRAM, SOME STRING
Next_Ptr_Glob->
Ptr_Comp: 5131
should be: (implementation-dependent), same as above
Discr: 0
should be: 0
Enum_Comp: 1
should be: 1
Int_Comp: 18
should be: 18
Str_Comp: DHRYSTONE PROGRAM, SOME STRING
should be: DHRYSTONE PROGRAM, SOME STRING
Int_1_Loc: 5
should be: 5
Int_2_Loc: 13
should be: 13
Int_3_Loc: 7
should be: 7
Enum_Loc: 1
should be: 1
Str_1_Loc: DHRYSTONE PROGRAM, 1'ST STRING
should be: DHRYSTONE PROGRAM, 1'ST STRING
Str_2_Loc: DHRYSTONE PROGRAM, 2'ND STRING
should be: DHRYSTONE PROGRAM, 2'ND STRING
Microseconds for one run through Dhrystone: 248
Dhrystones per Second: 4029
Whetstone
Download a version of Whetstone adapted for use with SDCC and the MB1036B board, and proceed as with Dhrystone above. SDCC 3.6.0 does not support double. It replaces double by float and emits a warning to the user. Thus the scores from Whetstone obtained using SDCC 3.6.0 are not really comparable to those from other platforms. Unlike Dhrystone, Whetstone runs the benchmark before doing any text output, so don't worry when it takes some time until something appears on the terminal.
Loops: 10, Iterations: 1, Duration: 19318 msec. C Converted Double Precision Whetstones: <NO FLOAT> KIPS
Since printf() does not have float support by default as of SDCC 3.6.0, you have to calculate the KIPS score from the data in the first row by hand: Multiply Loops by 100, divide by the duration in seconds. In this case we get a score of 51.7651 KIPS.
More about stm8flash
stm8flash was written by Valentin Dudouyt. It works both with stlink (including the one integrated on the discovery boards) and stlinkv2 devices. The programmer can be selected using -c stlink or -c stlinkv2. The target device is selected using the -p option (to get a list of target devices, use the -p option with an option argument that is not an stm8 device, e.g. -p help. stm8flash will treat filenames ending in .ihx or .hex as Intel hex, and other filenames as binaries.
More about SDCC
SDCC was initially written by Sandeep Dutta for the MCS-51, and has a relatively conservative architecture (see Sandeep Dutta, "Anatomy of a Compiler", 2000). It has been extended by various contributors and more recently, incorporated some cutting-edge technologies, in particular in register allocation (see Philipp Klaus Krause, "Optimal Register Allocation in Polynomial Time", 2013). The stm8 backend was mostly written by Philipp Klaus Krause for his research into bytewise register allocation and spilling (see Philipp Klaus Krause, "Bytewise Register Allocation", 2015).
SDCC is a C compiler that aims to be compliant with the C standards.
Important compiler options for STM8 developers include:
-cto compile into object files to be linked later--std-c99for compilation in C99 mode (some C99 features, e.g. variable-length arrays are not yet supported in sdcc though)--opt-code-sizefor optimization for code size--max-allocs-per-nodeto select the optimization level. the default value is 3000. Higher values result in more optimized code, longer compiler runtime, and higher memory usage during compilation.