Book Image

The Complete Edition - Software Engineering for Real-Time Systems

By : Jim Cooling
Book Image

The Complete Edition - Software Engineering for Real-Time Systems

By: Jim Cooling

Overview of this book

From air traffic control systems to network multimedia systems, real-time systems are everywhere. The correctness of the real-time system depends on the physical instant and the logical results of the computations. This book provides an elaborate introduction to software engineering for real-time systems, including a range of activities and methods required to produce a great real-time system. The book kicks off by describing real-time systems, their applications, and their impact on software design. You will learn the concepts of software and program design, as well as the different types of programming, software errors, and software life cycles, and how a multitasking structure benefits a system design. Moving ahead, you will learn why diagrams and diagramming plays a critical role in the software development process. You will practice documenting code-related work using Unified Modeling Language (UML), and analyze and test source code in both host and target systems to understand why performance is a key design-driver in applications. Next, you will develop a design strategy to overcome critical and fault-tolerant systems, and learn the importance of documentation in system design. By the end of this book, you will have sound knowledge and skills for developing real-time embedded systems.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Preface
15
Glossary of terms

11.7 Software Debugging in The Target – Combined Hardware/Software Techniques

11.7.1 Host/Target Interactive Debugging – Software Tracing

Having a monitor program in the target makes it possible to debug the target software interactively from the host machine. However, monitor-based methods are intrusive; thus, they intrinsically limit the quality and quantity of real-time data that can be gathered in a debugging session. The hardware-based methods described earlier get around this problem. Using these, we can obtain runtime information that just could not be accessed using a simple monitor. But they don't allow us to automatically compare source code aspects with the actual running code. If we could do that, though, we would end up with a greatly improved interactive real-time debugging capability. The only way to achieve such a goal is to combine hardware and software, forming a software trace debugger, as shown in Figure 11.39. The concept is to debug by examining...