It's not quite what you asked for (i.e. native), but it's worth mentioning for those who come across this page looking for a solution for development under Linux. The USB debugger does work if you run the regular Windows tools via VirtualBox. I've been doing this successfully running XP in a VM on Ubuntu. You'll need to make sure you use the USB-capable version of VirtualBox, and just need to set up a USB filter for the device under the Settings page for the VM. It's not ideal but it works.

Have you tried using Wine? I haven't tried myself, but someone on Hack-a-day mentioned they got the Windows IDE to run under Linux using Wine. Don't know if they could actually upload code to the chip. But it's a start.

Maybe some hacker, I mean programmer could create something like avrdude for the STM8, don't the AVR and STM8 both use C,C++ for coding?

I'm not a programmer by trade, but this seems like a logical step.

Running the IDE should work fine under Wine. Still, that sucks, cause you have to pretend you're in windows, don;t have native editing tools, and you're limited to 16K.

Any code editor should work for actually editing code, code:blocks or eclipse or whatever, at which point you need to call the compiler. Again, this is a question of "wine to the (almost) rescue", there's nothing stopping you setting up $IDE_OF_CHOICE to run 'wine $STM8S_COMPILER $ARGS' on hitting the compile button.

Still, it sucks, because you're still limited to 16k.

I have an almost-complete assembler for STM8MS here. Assemblers are a piece of piss to write, after all, I've only spent a couple of hours on it. It won't take long for it to be done and working, at which point you can write assembler code to your heart's content. I haven't bothered to make it handle macros, as these days it's easier to preprocess your source through ERB (embedded ruby) than write / adapt a macro engine. I don't much care about C, to be honest, but there's no particular reason that an enterprising soul couldn't add STM8S support to, for example, SDCC. That won't be me, though.

To a certain extent, that gets rid of the 16K limitation.

Which leaves loading code onto the device. For that, you still need windows. I'll be looking into this real soon, my devices should arrive this afternoon. What you need is the ability to log USB events, work out how those events translate to actual events, and work it into a driver or userland interface. I have that ability (done it for several devices already), I suspect quite strongly that the protocol used is very simple (these things usually are).

I'll post results here when I have them.

Running under Wine is a mixed success.

I haven't tried it myself yet, but there's this entry in Wine AppDB for the RKit from Raisonance. Looks like that it cannot connect to STM8S-DISCOVERY board via USB.

@Mr Foo:

I'm very interested in open-source development tools for STM8, be it assembler or C compiler. Do you have any updates or your work on this? Is the code for your assembler available somewhere? Under which (open-source?) license? What's the current status (what works, what doesn't?).

Thanks a lot!

Uwe.