A development of remote tracepoint debugger for run-time monitoring and debugging of timing constraints on Qplus-P RTOS

In this paper, we present a new tracepoint debugging tool for microcomputer embedded systems, e.g., information appliances, which facilitates the instrumentation of the Qplus-P RTOS applications with timing constraints. Compared with traditional breakpoint debugger, our tracepoint debugger provides the ability to dynamically collect and record application data for online examination and for further off-line analysis. And, each tracepoint can provide the means for assigning new values to the running application's variables, without either halting its execution or interfering with its natural execution flow. In particular, our tracepoint debugger is different from previous ones in that we can specify and detect the timing violations using RTL (Real-Time Logic) trace experiments. Using our tracepoint debugger, the user is able to place the RTL tracepoints in his program. For each tracepoint, the user can specify the data to be collected or monitored using C in-line statements as well as RTL-expressions.