We have a programmer/debugger for PICs, which supports most of the Microchip’s PIC micros. It was initially intended for our Development System (IDE, compiler etc.), but the System project has been abandoned for now. Of all the project, only the programmer/debugger has survived. It works fast and well. We sell it, but we only offer programming software for it. Even though the hardware has all the debugging capabilities for most PICs (almost 1,500 different part numbers), there’s no stand-alone debugging software and no integration with any debugger/IDE. Thus the debugging capabilities are not accessible to the customers.
I was thinking about developing a library to integrate our debugger with OpenOCD, so that the software which supports OpenOCD could use our hardware for debugging. The library is not going to be open source, but we can produce binaries for Windows/Linux/Mac. I am not an expert in OpenOCD, so I wanted to ask few questions:
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OpenOCD is open source, is the hardware integration through closed source libraries possible?
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Does OpenOCD has a documented interface for integration of hardware debuggers which I can use to connect the library?
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Would such integration be beneficial for OpenOCD users?