Chris M.

CMSIS-SVD is "Cortex Microcontroller Software Interface Standard" "System View Description". This is an ARM standard format for describing the registers and their bitfields for the Cortex-M series of ARM processors. If you have an account on the Arm website you can visit the STMicro cmsis page  where you can download the svd files for various STMicro processors. The STM32F10x svd files however appear to be missing important things like the system control block . This is an issue because I've been using the Eclipse plugin EmbSysRegView  to browse cpu registers during debug. The system control block is important because it contains various status registers that report fault status. These registers can help to locate issues in code or configuration. I posted a support question with ST and on their forums to see why their CMSIS-SVD doesn't appear to include all of the processors registers but I'll probably end up modifying the other EmbSysRegView proc...

Embedded processors tend to require a registers configuration beyond the traditional CPU registers found in the x86 architecture. Power, interrupts, clocks, I/O hardware modules can have from several to dozens of different registers that contain configuration settings. Having to find the address for each register is relatively painful. Some processors make it even more difficult with a configurable base address. Once you've found the address you want you still have to figure out what the bits in the register mean and which configurations are valid. Embedded development Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) like IAR's Embedded Workbench provide helpful address to value mappings for internal registers. EmbSys RegView is a plugin for Eclipse that breaks out the processors registers and fields (although it appears to lack a mapping for the meaning of the individual fields and the valid values). Eclipse EmbSys Registers pane