Profiling in deeply embedded systems

During the software development stage, every developer observes the program behaviour by using assertions, traces or other debugging methods, but most program bottlenecks and some bugs may surface only during program profiling. Software profiling in desktop systems is a relatively simple task, but unlike in desktop systems, profiling of deeply embedded systems is quite complicated task. In this paper we present a profiling approach for deeply embedded systems which uses GNU toolchain - GCC C compiler for code instrumentation and GProf tool for analysing output data. While we use code instrumentation and transmit profiling data immediately without any buffering, we lose only small amount of program performance.