Research And Application Of ARM CoreSight Trace Debugging Technology

With the development of embedded systems,increase of embedded applications and embedded systems complexity,the scale and complexity of embedded software system also grow increasingly.Software development account for more than 80% workload in the current embedded systems development,the quality and development cycle of embedded software have a decisive impact on the final quality and time-to-market of embedded product.Therefore,in order to maintain the competitiveness of the product,to support the user to execute embedded device software development faster and more efficient,embedded developers demand more powerful debugging techniques and tools for help in the development of complex embedded applications.In 2004,ARM had launched a new debug architecture named CoreSight to enhance the capacity of debugging.CoreSight architecture support the debugging of multi-core system,and provide high-bandwidth and real-time tracking for the whole system,including the tracking and monitoring for system bus.At the same time, ARM introduced a powerful embedded Integrated Development Environment named RealView Development Suite which is based on open source Eclipse IDE to develop and support CoreSight debugging technique,it can help design engineers to simplify the complexity of software development in multi-core processors or multi-processor architecture.This thesis,according to the study and analysis of ARM CoreSight debug architecture and the development of Event Viewer system which is the component part of the debugging module in RVDS integrated development environment, implements complete and real-time parsing for CoreSight trace datas which collected through the raw data source.Ultimately,these data information will be intuitionistic displayed to user by visual form in the display module,and it can provide much help for the follow performance analysis and debugging of embedded software systems.Firstly,this thesis studies some related techniques,including CoreSight debugging architecture,some common embedded debugging technology,Eclipse platform architecture and plug-in extension points.Secondly,this thesis,according to the study of status quo and development trend in embedded IDE and the requirement of Event Viewer system,introduces the overall design of this system and the dividing of function modules;Ultimately,gives a systematic third-party expansion design.Thirdly,this thesis focuses on the design and implementation of system parsing module.According to the analysis of the flow for parsing CoreSight trace data,this thesis introduces detailed design of the parsing module,and implements the parsing process based on ITM data stream.According to the requirement of system function and the design of parsing module,this thesis uses Eclipse plug-in extension points mechanism to divide parsing module for providing the third-party expansion interfaces,the third parties can provide their own parsing process by using these interfaces.Finally,this thesis uses Eclipse View extension point and SWT/JFace technology to design and implement the display module which including text,event,analog three types.This thesis focuses on the detailed design and implement of analog display part, these data information collected after parsing will be displayed to user by real-time curve form in analog display part,to provide visual description of analog datas trend.Results of research on this thesis can be used by the ARM Core user and the other third-party product providers,it can provide a greater help for the performance analysis of target board procedures and debugging of embedded software systems.