Arduino Pro IDE and Debugging Support/Configuration for the Portenta H7

[Jet_socks]

Hello,

I would like to know when the Arduino Pro IDE will be able to support debugging for the Portenta H7.

I'm sure it is just a matter of time and I completely understand but it would be helpful to know an ETA or just any additional information about its status/future plans.

Also, will the board need an external debugger or is the USB able to handle the functionality?
I know the STM32 chip has SWD/JTAG pins but I am only have a vague understanding of the hardware side of debugging. So, that's about all I can ask/say with respect to the electrical side of things.

However, if anyone has any guidance on how to set up the launch.json file for a Debug Configuration that would be very helpful. I'm a beginner with .json files and debug configurations. I have set up configurations before but with the help of the GUI in Eclipse. I am also not too familiar with .json files but know that they are a some sort of standard to help a user set-up things in a human and machine readable way. In the past, I have worked with STM MCUs before but I never really put much of an importance on how the configuration file was being set up in the background.

Any help is much appreciated.

Thank you

PS: I am currently running the IDE on a VM using Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS and have the IDE version Alpha 0.1.3.
PSS: I've been able to run the TRACE32 front-end debugger on my VM but I would really appreciate it if there was support for debugging within the IDE before I go all out on trying to learn the complex tool.

[pert]

Jet_socks:
Also, will the board need an external debugger or is the USB able to handle the functionality?

From your update, it seems you have already found the answer, but I'll reply anyway in case it will be helpful to other Portenta users with the same question: No external debugger is necessary. There is a built-in debugging capability called "ThreadDebug". You can see the library here:

ArduinoCore-mbed/libraries/ThreadDebug at master · arduino/ArduinoCore-mbed

(example sketch accessible via the Arduino IDE's File > Examples > ThreadDebug menu)
This is used by the Lauterbach TRACE32 debugger all Portenta H7 owners get for free, but there are also plans for supporting it directly in the Arduino Pro IDE's integrated debugger. That support not finished at this time though, so using TRACE32 or GDB directly is your best option at this moment.