Simulation-based debugging of soft real-time applications

Author

Albertsson, L.

fYear

2001

fDate

May 30 2001-June 1 2001

Firstpage

107

Lastpage

108

Abstract

We present a temporal debugger, capable of examining time flow of soft real time applications in Unix systems. The debugger is based on a simulator modelling an entire workstation in sufficient detail to run unmodified operating systems and applications. It provides a deterministic and non-intrusive debugging environment, allowing reproducible presentation of program time flow. The primary contribution of the paper is virtual machine translation, a technique necessary to debug applications in a simulated Unix system. We show how a virtual machine translator maps low-level data, provided by the simulator to data useful to a symbolic debugger. The translator operates by parsing data structures in the target operating system and has been implemented for the GNU debugger and simulated Linux systems.

Keywords

Unix; data structures; program debugging; program interpreters; real-time systems; virtual machines; GNU debugger; Unix systems; data structure parsing; debugger; low-level data; non-intrusive debugging environment; program time flow; reproducible presentation; simulated Linux systems; simulated Unix system; simulation based debugging; simulator; soft real time applications; symbolic debugger; target operating system; temporal debugger; unmodified operating systems; virtual machine translation; virtual machine translator; workstation modelling; Application software; Computational modeling; Computer simulation; Debugging; Linux; Operating systems; Real time systems; User interfaces; Virtual machining; Workstations;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Real-Time Technology and Applications Symposium, 2001. Proceedings. Seventh IEEE

Conference_Location

Taipei, Taiwan

ISSN

1080-1812

Print_ISBN

0-7695-1134-1

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/RTTAS.2001.929870

Filename

929870