Lauterbach now supports the real-time operating systems µC/OS-II and eCOS with its new TRACE32 Nios II Debugger tools. The awareness is included in all new releases of the TRACE32 software. The awareness for µC/OS-II and eCOS, which has been already available for other architiectures, is able to visualize all the RTOS objects. It provides separate windows for the display of tasks, semaphores, mailboxes etc. If the processor is capable of a dual-port access to the memory, these objects can be dis-played non-intrusively, while the application runs in real time. TRACE32 also supports the implementation of task related breakpoints. An example of this would be to set a breakpoint in shared code to halt only if a specific task hits it. A built-in stack coverage analysis allows a precise measurement of the stack usage of each task.

If the Nios II is built with a real time trace port, TRACE32 Real time traces are able to provide selective recording of the bus cycles. This data can then be used to examine the task switches and display the re-sults graphically. A performance analyzer automatically evaluates task and function run times. Statistic tables give accurate information about the system usage.

The JTAG tools can provide dynamic performance analysis without using the real time trace but this is slightly intrusive. TRACE32 periodically detects the running tasks and creates a graph of the task usage by the target. New pull-down menus, designed for the µC/OS-II or eCOS awareness, allow an easy ac-cess to the new functionality.

µC/OS-II and eCOS applications and the kernel awareness can be run in the TRACE32 Instruction Set Simulator, which is available, free of charge, from the Lauterbach website. This means the TRACE32 simulator can be used for a first prototyping, even before any hardware becomes available.

All the features that the TRACE32 Debugger provides for the mentioned RTOSs are implemented without any changes to the application or kernel. There are no patches, hooks or additional instrumentation to the code. Details of all the other RTOSs supported by TRACE32, free of charge, are available at Lauter-bach’s home page.