Debugging solution extends kernel awareness for RTOS

The debug tool from Lauterbach, TRACE32, already supports embOS on ARM, PowerPC, RX, SH and NIOS-II families and this tried and tested technology has now been extended to include RH850.

“The powerful TRACE32 debug tool is now complemented by embOS for RH850, the best in class RTOS on the marked. This will help the software engineers to code even more efficient applications as embOS has lowest latencies and extremely small footprint. It is another milestone of our partnership with Lauterbach,” said Til Stork, embOS Product Manager at SEGGER.

The embOS awareness plugin for TRACE32 allows the developer to visualise RTOS resources and objects such as task lists, mailboxes, timers and semaphores. Developers are free to investigate interrupt routines, drivers and application code all from within the familiar environment of TRACE32. When the awareness is configured, extra features become available, for instance the setting of task aware breakpoints.

All members of the RH850 family provide dedicated counter registers which can be accessed non-intrusively by the TRACE32 debugger. These can be configured to display minimum, maximum and mean run-times for a user marked block of code or the runtimes of various tasks in the embOS system.

Lauterbach’s TRACE32 debug tools have become a favourite with many hi-tech engineers, and the company is recognised for both engineering and technical support. TRACE32 supports all the major families of microprocessor cores, covering products from more than 75 silicon companies. The quality and capability of Lauterbach tools enable engineering teams to develop robust code whilst minimising development time lost to debugging.

“Our continued partnership with embOS allows users of RH850 devices to take full advantage of class leading tools and RTOS to developer smarter and more efficient embedded systems. This can only be good for the embedded industry by enabling developers to choose the best combination of tools and RTOS for their projects” said Barry Lock, UK General Manager of Lauterbach.

TRACE32 awareness for embOS does not require any additional target configuration or any hooks or patches within the RTOS itself. The philosophy of TRACE32 is for the application to behave exactly the same in the debug environment as on the final product, and only this way can 100% certainty of testing be achieved.

If the target provides off-chip trace capabilities, TRACE32 can also record processor cycles and can be configured to collect data on task switches. Using this information, a detailed analysis of the programme history, including task switches, can be viewed.