Lauterbach's TRACE32 Supports PikeOS for MPU

By Tiera Oliver

Associate Editor

Embedded Computing Design

January 19, 2022

News

Lauterbach's TRACE32 Supports PikeOS for MPU

Lauterbach and SYSGO announced the support of SYSGO's brand new product, PikeOS for MPU, within Lauterbach's TRACE32 debug environment. The support includes debugging and tracing PikeOS for MPU applications as well as combined debugging of MMU and MPU based systems.

Lauterbach and SYSGO enjoy a long-standing cooperation with TRACE32 supporting PikeOS for more than 15 years. The PikeOS awareness has always provided easy access to PikeOS objects, such as partitions, tasks and threads. TRACE32 gives the user concurrent access to all partitions and tasks. Developers can view variables and set breakpoints on any task (or several of them) at any time, whether the task is currently active or not.

Starting with the upcoming beta versions of PikeOS for MPU, Lauterbach and SYSGO collaborated to extend the existing PikeOS awareness to also support PikeOS for MPU. As a result, developers using PikeOS for MPU are now able to debug their applications and systems on TRACE32 just the same way as they are used to do it with the classic PikeOS. This also includes tracing the system as a whole, covering all partitions and tasks. Using the sampled trace, TRACE32 can create comprehensive performance analysis and code coverage metrics.

PikeOS for MPU is a ideal fit to work together with a classic PikeOS system, especially in asymmetrical multicore environments. On a complex SoC, for example the Xilinx Ultrascale+, you may run classic PikeOS as SMP on the Cortex-A53 cluster, alongside with several PikeOS for MPU as AMP on the secondary Cortex-R5 cores. TRACE32, on the other hand, not only supports all Cortex-A and Cortex-R variants, and also SMP and AMP configurations, but now also supports both PikeOS variants. This means, one TRACE32 hardware setup is sufficient to debug the entire system.

Starting an individual GUI for each PikeOS system, the developer can debug both PikeOS variants at the same time, with synchronized start and stop events. This is especially useful when looking for bugs in the communication between the systems. Moreover, TRACE32 can trace the whole system and show graphical charts of application and function run times. The timing is synchronized, which allows observation of the timing behavior of both, classic PikeOS and PikeOS for MPU, and measure latencies between both.

For more information, visit: www.sysgo.com/pikeos-for-mpu

Tiera Oliver, Associate Editor for Embedded Computing Design, is responsible for web content edits, product news, and constructing stories. She also assists with newsletter updates as well as contributing and editing content for ECD podcasts and the ECD YouTube channel. Before working at ECD, Tiera graduated from Northern Arizona University where she received her B.S. in journalism and political science and worked as a news reporter for the university’s student led newspaper, The Lumberjack.

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