NOTE

For the default HOST device to work, there must be a debugger to handle the C I/O requests; the default HOST device cannot work by itself in an embedded system. To work in an embedded system, you will need to provide an appropriate driver for your system.

NOTE

C I/O Mysteriously Fails

If there is not enough space on the heap for a C I/O buffer, operations on the file will silently fail. If a call to printf() mysteriously fails, this may be the reason. The heap needs to be at least large enough to allocate a block of size BUFSIZ (defined in stdio.h) for every file on which I/O is performed, including stdout, stdin, and stderr, plus allocations performed by the user's code, plus allocation bookkeeping overhead. Alternately, declare a char array of size BUFSIZ and pass it to setvbuf to avoid dynamic allocation. To set the heap size, use the --heap_size option when linking (refer to the Linker Description chapter in the MSP430 Assembly Language Tools User's Guide).

NOTE

Open Mysteriously Fails

The run-time support limits the total number of open files to a small number relative to general-purpose processors. If you attempt to open more files than the maximum, you may find that the open will mysteriously fail. You can increase the number of open files by extracting the source code from rts.src and editing the constants controlling the size of some of the C I/O data structures. The macro _NFILE controls how many FILE (fopen) objects can be open at one time (stdin, stdout, and stderr count against this total). (See also FOPEN_MAX.) The macro _NSTREAM controls how many low-level file descriptors can be open at one time (the low-level files underlying stdin, stdout, and stderr count against this total). The macro _NDEVICE controls how many device drivers are installed at one time (the HOST device counts against this total).