Analysis And Design Of Debugging Technology In Embedded System

Today with the application of digital information technology and network technology, embedded system has widely used in our daily lives. Debugging is an important process during the development of embedded system, and debugger is a basic part when a development environment is evaluated. So the catachrestic of embedded system decided the inevitability of cross-debugging.Firstly this paper described the characteristic of embedded system and the fundamental of cross-debugging, and presented the implement method and characteristic of some hardware debugger tools such as ICE, BDM, and JTAG, which are usually used in embedded system; at the same time, we compared these tools and got their advantage and disadvantage. And the simplicity of stub makes it be popular in debugging part of embedded system development. GDB is a widely used debugging system, deeply understanding the position and the function of all functional parts in GDB is helpful for us to design and implement of GDBstub, so we analysis 3 subsystem of GDB(user interface, symbol handling, object system handling) one by one. This paper also discussed the implement of GDB Remote debugging technology in kernel debugging and embedded system, GDB remote serial protocol, and the implement method of GDB debugging agent in kernel layer and application layer.At last we presented a debugging method without the modification of operation system's kernel, which is based on an GDBstub implement work on Intel Xscale, and this work is applied on Frame29 platform and participated by the author. Our proposed debugging method has strong portability, and it can efficiently remove the hidden risk of kernel modification, also reduce the work of kernel modifications. Applications in debugging micro-kernel operation system show that this method is very efficient.