A research on debugging tools’ platform independency

Abstract: Debugging of embedded systems is costly and time consuming,but imperative to system design. There are many different requirements on embedded systems and complying with these requirements has lead to many different kinds, and different configurations of embedded systems. The vast array of embedded systems, and the ever increasing complexity of the systems make debugging a growing challenge. Different domains impose different requirements on the systems and as embedded system pervade in our society, new requirement are introduced. ENEA’s products target various domains as: telecom, medical and the automotive domain. Targeting these three domains means that ENEA’s products need to comply with various, and stringent requirements. A debugging tool used in a tool chain like the tool chain developed in the iFEST project, as intended for ENEA’s debugging tool Optima, needs to support various debugging methods, ranging from software debugging methods to methods utilizing embedded hardware for debugging. The need for debugging tools in a tool chain to support various debugging methods lead to this master’s thesis, at and for ENEA. This thesis investigates methods to debug embedded systems in order to define enhancements of the debugging tool Optima that enables Optima to debug various systems and to debug all systems in ENEA’s target domains. The thesis is divided into two parts: a pre-study and a development part. The pre-study covers debugging of embedded systems by studying articles and ENEA’s operating system OSE and debugging tool Optima. Conclusion drawn from the study of methods to debug embedded systems and the study of the debugging support in Optima, show that Optima needs to utilize embedded hardware for debugging. Updates for Optima that enable utilization of embedded hardware for debugging are designed and implemented in the development part of the thesis. Hardware debugging facilities in the development platform targeted in this thesis are not fully incorporated. The lack of hardware debugging support in the platform makes it infeasible to debug the platform from software running on the processor core, and thus infeasible to improve Optima’s debugging capability by enhancing standard OSE debugging facilities to utilize embedded hardware for debugging. An external debugging tool, JTAG, is required to access the embedded debugging hardware in the target platform and to enable non-intrusive debugging.