Research of “Stub” remote debugging technique

Any application software will inevitably contain bugs during the development cycle. In order to correct these software flaws, developers need access to powerful debugging tools that allow them to be more efficient as well as be able to dig into the detailed operation of their application. Therefore, the debugger is a comparatively important tool in software development, particularly in the embedded software development. The paper analyses and studies the embedded debugging technique of stub mode. It adopts the remote serial communication protocol of GNU GDB, and takes over all exception handlers by software to implement debugging and tracking of object program. It realizes to read and to write memory units and registers, to set breakpoint, single step and to continue running. Stub mode is applied to RTEMS embedded real-time operating system and application program for debugging based on ARM.