Our TRACE32® Hypervisor- and OS-awareness technology significantly simplifies your debug activities, as you can immediately access all the components of the Hypervisor, OS and the applications: You can display system objects, such as tasks, threads, semaphores, and mailboxes, set task-aware breakpoints and perform task-aware performance monitoring. If your OS uses an MMU (Memory Management Unit), our debugger can access code and data using the information from the OS MMU tables and walk through it to find a valid logical-to-physical translation.
The availability of the individual features depends on the specifications of the chip used and your TRACE32® products. Learn more about it in the slides below.
Debugging an operating system requires special support from the debugger. We say that the debugger needs to be “aware” of the operating system. Since our TRACE32® debug- and trace tools support a wide range of target operating systems, this special support is not statically linked in the debugger software but can be dynamically loaded as an extension depending on which operating system is used.
Learn more about TRACE32 OS-Awareness
The set of files providing operating system debugging capabilities is called “awareness”. To be able to read the task list or to allow process or module debugging, the OS awareness accesses the OS kernel’s internal structures using the kernel symbols. The TRACE32 OS-awareness and the TRACE32 MMU support allow users to debug seamlessly across process boundaries: It is possible to directly access the virtual address space of each process and to display the current register set and the stack frame for every single process. After loading an OS specific extension, our TRACE32® PowerView software provides additional commands, options and displays, which simplify the debugging of the operating system.
Learn more about TRACE32 Hypervisor-Awareness
The virtualization concept allows multiple operating systems to be run in parallel on a single hardware platform. A hypervisor, which is the core of virtualization, ensures that everything works reliably and efficiently. The hypervisor is a software layer fulfilling two tasks: Starting and managing the virtual machines (VMs) and virtualizing the physical hardware resources for the VMs. An operating system running within a VM is referred to as a guest OS. All accesses by the guests to the virtualized hardware resources are mapped to the physical resources by the hypervisor.
Using our TRACE32® hypervisor-awareness, the debugger detects and visualizes the VMs of the hypervisor. it is now possible to debug several operating systems at the same time. The most important objective is seamless debugging of the overall system. This means that when the system has stopped at a breakpoint, you can check and change the current state of every single process, all VMs, plus the current state of the hypervisor and of the real hardware platform. In addition, you can set a program breakpoint at any location in the code.
For AUTOSAR-based, safety-critical (multicore) microcontroller/microprocessor systems in the automotive industry, advanced analysis techniques are required to prove functional safety. Our TRACE32® debug and trace tools not only enable deep insights into such systems thanks to our TRACE32® AUTOSAR OS awareness, but also advanced timing analysis solutions as a result of our long-standing cooperation with the most important AUTOSAR tool vendors.
TRACE32® supports all popular open source and commercial real-time and rich operating systems used in embedded applications and over 80 operating systems in total.
Our TRACE32® software package contains a ready-to-run configuration for the FreeRTOS Real Time Kernel. The FreeRTOS awareness provides easy access to task lists and other kernel information, generates performance analysis data and enables you to do a most effective debugging with the TRACE32® systems on targets running FreeRTOS.
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Our TRACE32® software package contains a ready-to-run configuration for the Linux operating system. The Linux awareness provides easy access to task lists and other kernel information, generates performance analysis data and enables you to do a most effective debugging with the TRACE32® systems on targets running Linux.
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Our TRACE32® software package contains a ready-to-run configuration for the PikeOS Real Time Operating System from SYSGO AG. The PikeOS awareness provides easy access to task lists and other kernel information, generates performance analysis data and enables you to do a most effective debugging with the TRACE32® systems on targets running PikeOS or PikeOS MPU.
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Our TRACE32® software package contains a ready-to-run configuration for the QNX Real Time Kernel from BlackBerry Limited. In close cooperation with BlackBerry, we built a high sophisticated QNX awareness, which enables you to do a most effective debugging with the TRACE32® systems on targets running QNX.
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Our TRACE32® software package contains a ready-to-run configuration for the VxWorks real-time kernel from Wind River. In close cooperation with Wind River, we built a high sophisticated VxWorks awareness, which enables you to do a most effective debugging with the TRACE32® systems on targets running VxWorks.
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Our TRACE32® software package contains a ready-to-run configuration for the open-source ZephyrOS Real Time Operating System. The ZephyrOS awareness provides easy access to task lists and other kernel information, generates performance analysis data and enables you to do a most effective debugging with the TRACE32® systems on targets running ZephyrOS.
Here you will find each of the more than 80 supported operating systems.
Find Your Target OSTRACE32® supports a wide range of open source and commercial static and dynamic hypervisors in embedded applications. Static hypervisors partition resources statically and assign them at system instantiation time, wheras dynamic hypervisors allocate the resources dynamically to a VM. Memory is usually assigned to a VM using a 2-stage translation performed by a MPU or MMU. Support for dynamic hypervisors is a unique feature of our TRACE32® tools in the embedded industry.
Even for operating systems for which we cannot provide out-of-the-box-support for OS-aware Debugging, e.g. for reasons of confidentiality, you can use our TRACE32® tools without having to do without this functionality.
Our TRACE32® PowerView GUI provides a mechanism to add customized features, called Extensions. In an Exten-sion you can call API functions to implement a wide variety of features, including display (RT)OS kernel resources (e.g. task lists), perform task aware statistical analysis or perform task specific stack coverage.
By doing this you can implement OS-aware Debugging for your own operating systems easily. All necessary tools to build an extension are included in our Extension Development Kit (EDK), which is available free of charge for TRACE32® customers on request.
