VSCode - IDF Extension 1.5 broke JTAG flashing for ESP32S3

[nwolcott]

I am using a STM32S3-WROOM-2 module (with the octal flash and psram) and connecting using the built-in USB JTAG (and the associated virtual com port).
My VSCode IDF plugin was automatically updated to version 1.5 a couple days ago and the JTAG flashing stopped working. When you click the flash device button, nothing happens. If you click the build, flash, and monitor button, it will run the build, but once that is finished, it never starts the flash operation. There is no error, the button task just silently stops where it used to spawn openOCD server and switch to its console tab.
I can manually run the flash using openOCD commands, so connectivity and configurations are ok. Once the module is manually flashed, JTAG debugging works with no errors. I can also switch the flash method to UART and it works.
This problem happened on all 3 separate workstations here at my office as soon as each one updated to version 1.5.
We were still using SDK version 4.4.1, but I updated to 4.4.2 yesterday and the problem still exists, so it seems to just be a problem with the scripting in the 1.5 extension.
The problem is easily reproducible using the hello world example.
Any suggestions?

[halemicro]

I can confirm this is not just your issue. It happened at a number of our workstations at lab and on my home machine. I reverted back to previous version of extension now other things are breaking. Still looking into this..

[gamarilla]

I can confirm that ir broke JTAG flashing and debugging on ESP32 too.
The format of OpenOCD output messages is different.
When flashing there is the popup "Flashing Project" but not the "Flashing Succesfully (JTag)"
I also tried to run ESP-IDF Doctor command and it doesn´t work, so I think that it is not exclusive to JTAG.
From what I read in other post, it may be related to Windows language locale (I am using spanish-spain settings on Windows 10)

[nwolcott]

I can confirm this is not just your issue. It happened at a number of our workstations at lab and on my home machine. I reverted back to previous version of extension now other things are breaking. Still looking into this..

It's good to know I'm not the only one who has seen this problem. For the record, I'm still having this problem on all 3 workstations at my office. We just work around it.
It seems like the option for selecting the internal USB JTAG on the S3 is missing from the set device target menu. I just pick one of the other options, then go manually change the settings.json file to what it was in the previous version. The option "idf.openOcdConfigs" should be "board/esp32s3-builtin.cfg".

[nwolcott]

I think I found the problem.
The issue was an older version of openOCD in the paths variables idf.customExtraPaths and idf.customExtraVars in settings.json.
Installing the new SDK had installed a new version of openOCD but several old versions were still installed. The path variables pointed to the old version and so that was the one that was running.
Note that there was no error message anywhere in the GUI; it just failed silently. I was filing a issue report on their github project and the report form asked me to upload the esp_idf_vsc_ext.log log file. When I opened up the file to take a look, I saw a bunch of these errors:

Code: Select all

{"user":true,"message":"Minimum OpenOCD version v0.10.0-esp32-20201125 is required while you have v0.11.0-esp32-20211220-1338-g554a6c26 version installed","stack":"Error: PRECHECK_FAILED\n\tat \\dist\\extension.js:1:4943\n\tat Array.forEach (<anonymous>)\n\tat C.perform (\\dist\\extension.js:1:4896)\n\tat \\dist\\extension.js:1:1248511\n\tat Generator.next (<anonymous>)\n\tat s (\\dist\\extension.js:1:1204263)\n\tat process.processTicksAndRejections (node:internal/process/task_queues:96:5)","level":"error","timestamp":"2022-09-16T17:15:37.521Z"}

That got me looking at the openOCD version, and after I updated the paths, I was able to flash successfully.

[gamarilla]

I can confirm that ir broke JTAG flashing and debugging on ESP32 too.
The format of OpenOCD output messages is different.
When flashing there is the popup "Flashing Project" but not the "Flashing Succesfully (JTag)"
I also tried to run ESP-IDF Doctor command and it doesn´t work, so I think that it is not exclusive to JTAG.
From what I read in other post, it may be related to Windows language locale (I am using spanish-spain settings on Windows 10)

Changed in settings.json: "idf.notificationSilentMode": false,
This setting enables notifications when finished Building or Flashing.

Also reinstalled ESP IDF. Now I can debug, but I receive errors on the first attempt to launch debugger.
Receiving "ERROR: Unable to start debugging. Failed to find thread 1 for break event"
"The program ´....elf´ has exited with code 42 (0x0000002a)."

Then I retry and it works. Sometimes I have to retry 2 times.