Embedded OS are at the heart of many of today’s ARM Powered^® applications. Working with an embedded OS provides many off-the-shelf software components with useful levels of abstraction that need to be captured and presented to developers through a powerful debug environment.

The debugger in the RealView^® Development Suite gives developers the highest level of visibility and control of their embedded OS, allowing them to:

• Visualize several distinct execution contexts, one for each thread or process
• Interact with individual threads, processes and middleware components independent of others

Process and Thread Awareness
A key part of debugging a multi-tasking application is watching the interaction between different threads or processes (execution contexts) and the resources they are using.

Developers can view the source and states of multiple threads and processes (execution contexts) on multiple processors simultaneously by creating a debug window for each execution context that they are interested in. In addition, any debug window can be used to rapidly cycle through the source and state of every thread in the system.

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The debugger in the RealView Development Suite supports:

• Halted System Debug - where everything on the target is stopped
• Running System Debug - where some or all of the target system continues to run

When using Running System Debug, individual threads can be stopped, stepped and variable modified giving developers a unique insight into their running system.

Resource Control
The resource viewer in the debugger provides a detailed picture of OS and middleware resources in the target system. Resource updates are color coded to show exactly which resources have changed between breakpoints or steps, making it easy to find how resources change as the system runs.

Resources such as mailboxes, queues, semaphores, mutex, file handles and TCP/IP connections are displayed in detail, making it easy to find bottlenecks and starvation. When using Running System Debug, resources can be examined and modified giving developers maximum control of their running system.

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Embedded OS Supported
The debugger in RealView Development Suite supports both application library and embedded OS debug and is available for the embedded OS and middleware listed below: