A Runtime Verification Tool for Detecting Concurrency Bugs in FreeRTOS Embedded Software

This article presents a runtime verification tool for embedded software executing under the open source real-time operating system FreeRTOS. The tool detects and diagnoses concurrency bugs such as deadlock, starvation, and suspension based-locking. The tool finds concurrency bugs at runtime without debugging and tracing the source code. The tool uses the Tracealyzer tool for logging relevant events. Analysing the logs, our tool can detect the concurrency bugs by applying algorithms for diagnosing each concurrency bug type individually. In this paper, we present the implementation of the tool, as well as its functional architecture, together with illustration of its use. The tool can be used during program testing to gain interesting information about embedded software executions. We present initial results of running the tool on some classical bug examples running on an AVR 32-bit board SAM4S.