A Design and Implementation of a Remote Debugging Environment for Embedded Internet Software

Abstract

It is necessary to use development tools in developing embedded realtime application software for Internet appliances. In this paper, we describe an integrated remote debugging environment for Q+(QPlus) real-time kernel which has been built for an embedded internet application. The remote development toolset called Q+Esto consists of several independent support tools: an interactive shell, a remote debugger, a resource monitor, a target manager and a debug agent. Using the remote debugger on the host, the developer can spawn and debug tasks on the target run-time system. It can also be attached to alreadyrunning tasks spawned from the application or from interactive shell. Applicatoin code can be viewed as C source, or as assembly-level code. It incorporates a variety of display windows for source, registers, local/global variables, stack frame, memory, event traces and so on. The target manager implements common functions that are shared by Esto tools, e.g., the host target communiction, object file loading, and management of target-resident host tool’s memory pool and of target system symbol-table, and so on. These functions are called OPEN C APIs and they greatly improve the extensibility of the Esto Toolset. Debug agent is a daemon task on real-time operating systems in the target system. It gets requests from the host tools including debugger, interprets the requests, executes them and sends the results to the host.