There are times when troubleshooting embedded
development is like a black art, where problems occur
mysteriously and for no apparent reason. The EDGE Profiler was
introduced to demystify these cases by letting you see what
the underlying RTOS and application code are doing. In
addition, we added performance-measuring capability to the
product, letting you see what’s happening inside the black
box.
The EDGE Profiler consists of two software
components: an embedded agent running on the target and a
GUI-based analysis residing on your host PC. The EDGE Profiler
doesn’t require additional hardware like trace buffers or
specialized connection modules to run, which also means that
it is easily portable across a wide variety of processors.
The target side of the EDGE Profiler works
by adding specialized code into the RTOS that captures system
events and sends them to the agent to transmit back to the
host for analysis. To make the product even more useful, we
built in the capability to allow developers to add their own
hooks into their application code.
The host side of the tool is an
Eclipse-based plugin. This shows the events in the order that
they occur, with timestamps. Memory pool allocations and
deallocations are shown, and time measurement between any two
points in the display is as easy as a mouse click.
The EDGE Profiler already knows about the
Nucleus PLUS Real-Time OS, and can let you monitor the status
and performance history of all the Real-Time OS elements. By
extending the capability to insert user-defined events into
application code, developers can get a quantitative
measurement of how well their algorithm is tuned. In addition,
event capture filters can be set and downloaded to the target
without recompiling the code.
FEATURES
- The host-side part of the EDGE Profiler
is a plug-in into the Eclipse framework, familiar to EDGE
IDE and Debugger users
- The target-side part of the EDGE Profiler
knows about all of the functionality of the Nucleus PLUS
real-time operating system
- Users can add customized instrumentation
hooks into their application code easily for additional
performance metrics
- Filters can selectively capture the
events of interest without having to recompile the target
application code
- Broad processor support means that most
mainstream processors are supported with little work needing
to be done by the developer
- Ethernet communication can be used to
transfer event data from the target to the host
EDGE Profiler Memory Pools
The EDGE Profiler Memory View shows OS
memory allocations and deallocations.
- Blue
dots represent match memory
pool allocations and deallocations.
- A red
dot represents memory pools
that have been deallocated without a matching allocation.
These areas could represent bad pointers.
- A green
dot represents memory pools
that have been allocated without a matching deallocation.
These dots could be memory leaks.
EDGE Profiler Tasks View shows
OS and user-defined events in the order that they occur.
