Monitor Your RTOS Over USB

Monitor your RTOS over USB

Tracealyzer adds extra streaming and other features

15th December 2016 Tamworth UK: Phaedrus Systems, the leading specialist in the support of engineers at all stages of embedded safety-critical and high-integrity projects, has announced that Tracelyzer , the RTOS visualization tool from Percepio, now provides USB trace streaming - the transfer of data on RTOS behaviour to a host PC.

The new release, Tracealyzer v3.1, also provides detection of dynamic memory leaks, and includes many other updates to get up and running even quicker.

" Tracealyzer v3.1 is the first RTOS trace tool to support RTOS trace using just a standard USB cable, allowing you to use any debug probe in parallel," said Chris Hills, CTO of Phaedrus Systems "The other enhancements in this release lay a solid foundation for vast improvements of the analysis capabilities that Percepio plans for Tracealyzer during 2017.”

The enhancements include making the trace recorder library easier to configure for streaming over custom interfaces, and includes support for USB streaming on STM32 (easily adapted for other MCUs). USB offers excellent performance for RTOS tracing and over 600 KB/s has been measured on an STM32 using USB 2, several times more than required. Other stream ports include TCP/IP (example for lwIP) and SEGGER J-Link debug probes. Tracealyzer 3.1 can also receive trace streams via Windows COM ports, e.g. from USB CDC connections, UART connections or any virtual COM port provided by other target interfaces.

Tracealyzer v3.1 has also been extended to identify memory leaks in systems that use dynamic memory allocation. It can record memory allocation events (e.g. malloc, free) from multiple operating systems, and can now display such allocations that have not been released. Since the memory allocation events are linked to the task trace, the user can quickly find the context of the allocation and investigate the problem.

The recorder library has been improved significantly to simplify integration and now provides a common API for both streaming and snapshot recording that makes it easier to get started with snapshot recording and then switch to streaming, or vice versa.

About Tracealyzer

Percepio’s market-leading visualization offers 25+ views, which are cleverly interconnected to allow viewing the trace from multiple perspectives, for instance CPU usage, memory allocation, task synchronization and communication events, as well as selected state variables and input/output values.

The insight provided by Tracealyzer facilitates debugging, validation, profiling, documentation and training. This can help avoid weeks of troubleshooting and vastly increase development speed.

About Percepio AB

Founded in 2009 and based in Västerås, Sweden, Percepio is a developer of highly visual runtime diagnostics tools for embedded and Linux-based software. Percepio’s tool family Tracealyzer provides an unprecedented level of insight into the runtime world of embedded software, which facilitates understanding, troubleshooting and optimization. Tracealyzer gives embedded software developers better means to create more robust and efficient software, on time and within budget. Percepio collaborates with several leading vendors of operating systems for embedded software.

About Phaedrus Systems

Phaedrus Systems is the UK’s leading specialist in the support of engineers at all stages of embedded safety-critical and high-integrity projects. Tools available include requirements capture for IEC 61508, EN 50128 and nuclear applications; requirements tracking and competency tools; estimation software; SIL3 RTOS; hi-rel embedded database; compiler validation reports and reliability/failure software. Consultants have experience working on automotive, rail and aerospace applications, meeting standards such as IEC 61508 SIL4, and D0178B. Backing these is a wide range of other relevant embedded tools. Phaedrus Systems is based in Tamworth, Staffordshire. More information is available on the website www.phaedsys.com

Phaedrus Systems

Chris Hills, CTO

Tel: +44 (0) 1827 259546

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