Where are Device Family Packs (DFPs) Installed?
Depending on your software project type (bare-metal C, MPLAB® Harmony 3 project, etc.), Device Family Packs (DFPs) can be installed at several locations on your computer.
DFPs Managed and Used by MPLAB X IDE
DFPs managed and used by MPLAB X Integrated Development Environment (IDE) are installed in two locations on your computer, as shown in the Pack Manager.
System Packs Location
DFPs that are distributed and installed during the MPLAB X IDE installation are called System Packs and are located in the following folders:
Windows®
C:\Program Files\Microchip\MPLABX\<ide_version>\packs\Microchip\<device_pack>\<dfp_version>
macOS®
/Applications/microchip/mplabx/<version>/packs/Microchip/<device_pack>/<dfp_version>
Installed System Packs are indicated in the Pack Manager window with the word "Installed" with a lock icon, as seen in the accompanying image.
User Packs Location
This folder contains all DFPs which have been installed through the Pack Manager Update mechanism or manually installed by the user.
Windows
C:\Users\<user_name>\.mchp_packs\MIcrochip\<device_pack>\<dfp_version>
macOS
/Users/<user_name>/.mchp_packs/Microchip/<device_pack>/<dfp_version>
Installed User Packs are indicated with the word "Uninstall" in the Pack Manager window as shown in the accompanying image.
DFP Persistence with MPLAB X IDE
When you uninstall MPLAB X IDE, you uninstall the system DFPs. However, the user DFPs will persist on your computer.
DFPs Managed and Used by the MPLAB Harmony 3 Framework
The MPLAB Harmony 3 framework maintains its own repository of DFPs on GitHub.
When you use MPLAB Harmony 3 Content Manager to download components to your PC, a copy of this repository is also downloaded.
When you build an MPLAB Harmony 3 application using MPLAB Harmony 3 Configurator, all the required DFP files are copied into the Harmony 3 project folder. The MPLAB X IDE DFPs are not used.
Benefits of the MPLAB Harmony 3 DFP usage strategy are:
- Project is self-contained
- Removed dependency on DFP
- Project can be shared without the need to share and install the DFP
DFPs Components Bundled With MPLAB XC Compilers
MPLAB XC compilers ship with a set of resources (MCU header files) derived from a DFP release, as shown in the accompanying image with MPLAB XC32:
The version of the DFP can be determined by opening the component-version.h file as shown in the accompanying image.
Within MPLAB X IDE, you can choose to override the default (MPLAB X IDE-managed) DFPs with the compiler-supplied DFPs via the following Project setting shown in the accompanying image.
When using the compiler for standalone compilation on the command line, you can use the -mdfp switch to specify a specific DFP to use for compilation:
