Based On Embedded Hardware Simulator Sky Tune, Performance Monitoring System

With the prevalence of the computer application, development of internet, manufacture of fully automatic product and revival of large scale e-bussiness activity, high-level coordinated scientific experiment and digitalized family, a vast mount of embedded devices are embedded to our work and life. They turn to be portable or wearable devices. What's more, they combine with facilities in our daily life. Embedded software is the core of digitalized products. In the low level implementation of embedded system, designers always have to deal with complex hardware situations (as the hardware may be still under development) and high development cost, but with poor debugging and profiling tools.This paper discourses upon the author's research work based on "Component-based Embedded Operating Systems and Developing Environment" which is part of the National High Technology Development 863 Program of China and is aimed to make research of a component-based embedded operating system platform Pcanel, and the research work is doing on embedded hardware emulator SkyEye. The major research of the thesis is to develop a portable and flexible performance monitoring system for embedded systems based on SkyEye, which can be used in system level software tuning and has special supports for component-based systems like Pcanel.This paper first discusses the specialty of embedded system and main debugging methods used in embedded developments, and their advantages and disadvantages. It then presents the possibility and necessiraty of using embedded hardware emulators during developing, and the importance of software performance in an embedded environment. On the basis of analyzing SkyEye in details (including the main idea of target simulating module in SkyEye, especially static and dynamic configurations of simulating hardware, exception handling, and I/O, etc), the author reconstructs SkyEye by adding a virtual performance-monitoring device. Take XScale LUBBOCK board and Pcanel as an example, the author implemented hardware support of the virtual device, and also implemented a device driver, which is able to provide general performance monitoring data, and component interaction related data. Also, a tool for displaying the data in an understandable way is provided, the tool can analyze the data collected by SkyTune system and point out the bottlenecks of the profiled system. Finally, the last chapter is the summary and prospect of future work.