OpenOCD Troubleshooting: Unable to Fetch Product Description

You run OpenOCD on Ubuntu and it cannot communicate with your FTDI drivers. If you use an OpenOCD build compiled with the libftdi driver library, it exits on startup after printing this error:

Error: unable to open ftdi device: unable to fetch product description

OpenOCD requires superuser privileges to communicate with your drivers. For information on running OpenOCD as root on Ubuntu, see OpenOCD and Permissions. If you have access to your system's root password and wish to allow other users to run OpenOCD without sudo, see Accessing Devices without Sudo.