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Cortex-Debug is an extension to add debugging capabilities for ARM Cortex-M devices to Visual Studio Code.

Please read the Overview document to understand this extension and the debugging process better.

VSCode Settings for Cortex-Debug

There are dozens of options that are more suitable for global or workspace settings. There are two key settings we need for the tool to even function

cortex-debug.armToolchainPath - there are many versions of this for customization for each OS. This is the directory that contains all the GNU toolchain executables. There are many, and currently, we rely on gdb, objdump, and nm. Maybe different in the future. *Note: This does not have to be ARM specific, it can be anything but we are historically built for a 32-bit ARM embedded device`
cortex-debug.armToolchainPrefix - Historically, the prefix was arm-none-eabi and this is our default. But that has been changing and there are far too many distributions with custom builds/prefixes, so you may have to customize this.

So, basically,

Segger J-Link GDB Server (https://www.segger.com/) (https://wiki.segger.com/J-Link_Visual_Studio_Code). Make sure you use the JLinkGDBServerCL.exe or JLinkGDBServerCLexe and not the GUI versions
STMicroelectronic's ST-LINK GDB server supplied as part of the STM32CubeIDE (https://www.st.com/resource/en/user_manual/dm00613038-stm32cubeide-stlink-gdb-server-stmicroelectronics.pdf)
PE-Micro GDB Server (http://www.pemicro.com)
Texane's St-Link Utils (https://github.com/stlink-org/stlink)
Black Magic Probe Embedded GDB server (https://github.com/blacksphere/blackmagic/wiki)
PyOCD (https://github.com/mbedmicro/pyOCD)
OpenOCD (Note: Please use the latest version, 0.11.0 when writing this, prebuilt binaries for Windows)
- Many vendors (ST, Cypress/Infineon) ship their own modified versions of OpenOCD. You must use their version to be fully compatible with their devices
QEMU Emulated Environment
Renode Emulated Environment (https://renode.io)