@whitequark I'm not confident I know exactly which pieces you've been working on here. But I have dreamed to do something like this for a custom DSP inside an FPGA at work. I'm not afraid of getting my hands dirty. But the last time I tried to find the "hello-world tutorial" for connecting gdb to an arbitrary device I didn't get very far. I'd love to connect it via our existing cli/debug interface (serial-usb). I've implemented everything needed to do step debugging in the hdl, but no gdb yet.