PikeOS RTOS integrated with debugger tools from Lauterbach

Posted by John McHale
MAINZ, Germany, 2 April 2011. Lauterbach's TRACE32 Debugger tools are now integrated with the PikeOS real-time-operating system (RTOS) from SYSGO. PikeOS is based on the SSV (Safe & Secure Virtualization) technology, which is certifiable according to safety standards such as DO178B, IEC61508, EN 50128, and ISO26262.
The PikeOS awareness is included in all new releases of the TRACE32 software for PowerPC; other architectures will follow soon.
With TRACE32, the debugging capability applies to a full range of items, from bootstrap code to interrupt routines and drivers. The PikeOS awareness provides easy access to PikeOS resources such as partitions, processes, and threads. Because PikeOS is also a virtualization platform, it is important to be able to debug any application, whatever partition or type of partition (called Personality) this application belongs to.
Performance analysis on threads can be performed, showing when and which thread was running, how much time each thread consumed and how often it was preempted. TRACE32 gathers all this information in real-time and non-intrusively, thus not affecting the customers application. To comply with the full MMU support of PikeOS, TRACE32 also includes full MMU support, so the user is able to debug several tasks in different PikeOS partitions concurrently, regardless which partition the CPU currently works on. Therefore, TRACE32 provides full access to the complete system at any time.
Because PikeOS is mainly used for safety, security, and mission critical systems, debugging of such software parts as bootstrap code, initialization phase, interrupt routines, drivers, and kernel is mandatory. TRACE32 hardware debugger provides this functionality.
"Lauterbach is known for their high quality products and a range of functionality that makes them one of the technological leader in their domain," says Jacques Brygier, vice president of marketing at SYSGO. "We are very happy to have the TRACE32 tool now available to our customers. The development of critical applications with PikeOS requires the best of tools at each stage, and the choice of Lauterbach is a no-brainer."
All features that the TRACE32 debugger provides for the PikeOS RTOS are implemented without any changes to the application or kernel. There are no patches, hooks or additional instrumentations of the code. It is part of Lauterbach's philosophy to make TRACE32 debug exactly the same program code that will be incorporated into the finished product. This is the only way to guarantee, 100 percent, that the original application is tested and running correctly.
"We were very impressed by the scalability of PikeOS that can be seen as a high performance RTOS as well as a powerful embedded virtualization platform," says Rudolf Dienstbeck, from Lauterbach. "Our TRACE32 debugger showed its unique flexibility by providing an integration that keeps all its major features targeting a multi-partitioning certified operating system, based on a separated micro-kernel and a wide set of Personalities. When adopting PikeOS, our customers will benefit from the same high level functionality they appreciate from Lauterbach for a long time."
PikeOS enables multiple operating system interfaces, called Personalities, to work on separate sets of resources within a single machine. Examples of Personalities include Linux, POSIX, Android, RTEMS, ARINC-653, and many others. A Windows Personality is currently being developed. Because of the resource separation enforced by the PikeOS microkernel, multiple applications with different safety and security requirements and belonging to different Personalities are able to co-exist on the same hardware platform. The PikeOS microkernel architecture allows it to be used in cost-sensitive, resource constrained devices as well as large, complex systems. PikeOS supports many different single- and multi-core processor architectures such as x86, PowerPC, MIPS, ARM, SPARC, or SH. Support of multi-core offers a flexible approach to the user who can select an execution model ranging from a pure AMP (Asymmetric Multi Processing) to full SMP (Symmetric Multi Processing).
Details of the PikeOS awareness features in TRACE32 are available at Lauterbach’s home page www.lauterbach.com.