TRACE32® supports Windows Embedded Compact 2013
Höhenkirchen-Siegertsbrunn, November 2013 – Lauterbach GmbH, the leading manufacturer of microprocessor development tools, has recently extended its support for the Windows Embedded Compact RTOS family. It now supports the latest version “Windows Embedded Compact 2013”. The “TRACE32” debugger is also compatible with the new Microsoft ARM compiler with Thumb2 code generation that is included. TRACE32 therefore provides easy and integrated development and test of kernel, drivers, processes and DLLs. By adding a hardware trace module to the system, the user can execute real-time performance analysis down to thread level.
As a successor to Compact 7, Windows Embedded Compact 2013 has now been available for a couple of months and Lauterbach has extended its “Windows Embedded Awareness” for the TRACE32 debugger to include this new version.
For ARM based processors, Microsoft provides the new embedded RTOS with a completely new compiler which generates Thumb2 code. This change has meant BSP developers have to make a considerable effort to port their code so Lauterbach has enhanced its debugger to read the code and symbol information provided by this new compiler. This is especially important in the board bring-up phase.
Using the “Windows Embedded Awareness” included in TRACE32, the user is able to inspect the current processes and threads. With TRACE32 you can do this even if no software debug channel (e.g. KITL) and no shell is present in the system. Using the extended MMU support of the TRACE32 debugger, the developer has access to the complete virtual address space at any time – i.e. you can debug bootstrap, kernel, drivers and applications simultaneously. You can also debug several processes at once, which is especially interesting for testing inter-process communications.
If the system is based on a CPU with tracing capability (e.g. Cortex-A with ETM) then TRACE32 records the complete program flow without instrumenting the code. Using those records, thread switches can be examined and graphically displayed. Code coverage information can be obtained down to individual lines of code and also thread run times and function run times can be analyzed to provide performance details. Statistic tables provide accurate information about the system load.
The debugger also supports Symmetric Multi Processing (SMP), which distributes an application onto several similar processors or cores. The developer can concentrate on the debugging of his application, independent of which core is currently running the thread. The debugger can switch to any CPU at any time, showing the view of code running on each CPU. It evaluates the call stacks of all active and passive threads and shows where an active thread is currently running or where a passive thread is waiting.
By using the support for Windows Embedded Compact 2013, the developer will gain access to the complete system and all OS resources. You get visibility all the way from the reset vector up to the “app”.
Windows Embedded Compact 2013 support is available immediately.