• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.166-181
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• 2003

With the rapid growth of Internet, many devices such as Web TVs, PDAs and Web phones, begin to be directly connected to the Internet. These devices need real-time operating systems (RTOS) to support complex real-time applications running on them. Development of such real-time applications called embedded internet applications, is difficult due to the lack of adequate tools, especially debuggers. In this paper we present a new tracepoint debugging tool for the Qplus-T RTOS embedded system, which facilitates the instrumentations of the real-time software applications with timing trace-points. Compared with traditional breakpoint debugger, this trace-point debugger provides the ability to dynamically collect and record application data for on-line examination and for further off-line analysis. And, the trace-points can also provide the means for assigning new values to the running application's variables, without neither halting its execution nor interfering with its natural execution flow. Our trace-point debugger provides a highly efficient method for adding numerous monitoring trace-points within a real time target application such as Qplus-T internet applications, utilizing these trace-points to monitor and to analyze the application's behavior while it is running. And also, our trace debugger is different from previous one in that we can specify and detect the timing violations using its RTL (Real-Time Logic) trace experiments.