CMSIS Pack remarks and criticism

The good parts

CMSIS Pack is an important step forward towards the standardisation of ARM Cortex-M system software, hardware description and documentation.

It provides silicon vendors with a great method to describe their chips in a structured way, from the full list of part numbers down to register level. These are all very useful information, since they are the basis for advanced tools, like project creation wizards (requiring the actual list of available parts and their associated header files and build details) and debugger register viewers (requiring detailed knowledge on the actual peripherals available in a chip variant and their full register definitions, down to bit level).

The bad parts

The advantage of being a great tool for silicon vendors is probably its worse disadvantage, since (at least the current version, v1.3) CMSIS Pack seems intended mainly to silicon vendors, and not to general software distribution (like eCos CDL).

The second major disadvantage (partly understandable by its origins) is the deep bias towards µVision, a proprietary tool by Keil, which limits (and sometime even voids) its usefulness in open environments, like GCC and Eclipse.

TODO: add more detailed remarks