Debugger gains Symbian awareness

The Trace32 debugger now provides support for the Symbian OS real-time operating system (RTOS) from Symbian.

The Trace32 debugger now provides support for the Symbian OS real-time operating system (RTOS) from Symbian.

All versions of the Symbian OS are supported including the new kernel architecture EKA2.

By using this awareness, Lauterbach's Trace32 debugger can visualise the OS resources (such as process tables) and provide the user with the control necessary to debug drivers, processes, applications and libraries.

Using the optional Trace32 program trace modules developers can also perform real-time performance analysis at the threads level.

Purchasers of Trace32 will receive the Symbian OS awareness at no extra cost.

The Symbian OS awareness provided by the Trace32 debugger is available for all ARM and XScale based architectures.

Currently it supports Symbian OS versions 6.x, 7.0s, 8.0a (all EKA1) and 8.0b (EKA2).

The awareness creates additional debug windows that contain tables and detailed information about the processes, threads and libraries present in the target.

Using the highly sophisticated MMU support provided by the Trace32 debugger, the developer can access the whole virtual and physical address range at any time.

This means the developer can debug bootstrap, interrupts and drivers, and also the processes and applications all from within the same environment.

Trace32 also supports the use of thread-related breakpoints.

As an example this could mean that in shared code a breakpoint would only halt if a specific thread hits it.

A built-in stack coverage analysis provides a precise measurement of the stack usage of each thread.

The user can also view the call stack for each task.

If the application is based on a processor with tracing capability (such as ETM), Trace32 selectively records the processor cycles.

Using these records, thread switches can be examined and graphically displayed.

Thread run times and function run times are automatically evaluated for performance analysis.

Statistic tables give accurate information about the system load.

Even if real-time trace is not available Trace32 can provide a dynamic performance analysis.

It periodically detects which threads are running on the target and creates graphs of the system usage.

Easy access to all this new functionality is provided by custom pull-down menus specifically created for the Symbian OS awareness.

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