Debugging and profiling is an important part of the development workflow for any type of application. In the case of an embedded environment, these tasks require special attention from developers. Embedded applications run on a system that might be very different from a developer's workstation, and that often has limited resources and user interface capabilities.
Developers should plan in advance how they are going to debug their application during the development phase, and how they are going to determine the root causes of, as well as fix, the issues in the production environment.
Often, the solution is to use an emulator for a target device along with an interactive debugger that is provided by the embedded system vendor. For more complex systems, however, complete and accurate emulation is hardly feasible, and remote debugging is the...