Research And Implementation Of Embedded Multi-core Debugger

With the development of multi-core technology, the multi-core processor has taken place of the single-core processor and became the main stream of the market because of its advantages in low-energy consumption and high performance. Meanwhile, the applications based on multi-core processor also face some new problems. In addition to new programming methods, the multi-core architecture requires new ways of debugging to ensure the success of software debugging and make full use of the multi-core system. The products of most current embedded manufacturer are based on the specific hardware debugger to debug multi-core systems. Therefore, the software debugging methods become the research hot spots of the multi-core architecture because of the high price and incompatibility of hardware debugging methods.This thesis analyses the strategies of how the embedded Linux operating system supports the SMP and studies the technologies of embedded multi-core debugging considering its function requirements. By improving the GDB debugger, multi-core debugging system is realized, which is easy to use, low in cost and flexible for portability. In order to meet the debugging requirements in the embedded multi-processor architecture, the debugger can reflect the multi-core information comprehensively. From the view of the cores, the debugger can output the interactive information between the processes and the cores, which helps to understand the runtime of the processes.The multi-core debugger is based on the quad-core PB11 MPCore embedded platform and ARM Linux operating system. It makes improvements on the traditional GDB debugging function, and equips with the additional ability of multi-core debugging, such as the commands of inquiry, multi-core control and multi threads. The commands of information query can show the information of CPU, the distribution of the process-runtime on multi-core systems and the context information between the specified processes and cores. The commands of multi-core control can bind a process to a specified core, make the specified kernel execute a debugging command and set a breakpoint on a specified core. The commands of multi-thread debugging optimize the multi-thread debugging commands to improve the debugging efficiently. Finally, the commands of multi-core debugger are tested and results show that our debugger can meet some requirements of multi-core debugging.