Zealcore System Debugger
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[edit] Zealcore
[edit] Company
Zealcore is a Swedish software development company whose main interest is to provide developers with debugging tools to help them “find the last bug”. Its products are targeted to accelerate development and troubleshooting of embedded systems software through instrumentation, trace analysis, profiling and visualization tools.
[edit] Products
The three main products of Zealcore are the System Debugger, the Model Replay Debugger and the System Recorder. The System Recorder provides a general framework for recording system data. The currently supported operating systems are VxWorks, Enea OSE and Linux. The System Debugger is a post analyzer and graphical viewer of logged information. It will be described briefly in the next section. The Model Replay Debugger records and displays the behavior of UML models. It can also check for assertions to help identify model faults.
[edit] System Debugger
The System Debugger provides multiple browsers to visualize the logged information in different ways. They are the Timeline Browser, Gantt chart, Text browser, Sequence diagram, state diagram and the plot. The Timeline Browser displays the relative logarithmic time distance, between events. Different events can be shown with different colors on the timeline. A dynamic legend displays the events colors just for the ones appearing on the timeline. When an event is selected, its occurrence time is shown. The common timebase for the system debugger is time in nanoseconds since the epoch. The Gantt chart displays the scheduling of threads. Every thread execution is drawn horizontally taking into consideration the time it was scheduled in, how long it executed, and the time it was scheduled out. The text browser displays the events with all of their fields in a human readable way, one event per line. The Sequence diagram shows processes or objects (actors) as parallel vertical lines, and messages passed between them as horizontal arrows. The State Diagram shows for a given actor the model of its recorded behavior. The current state is marked by a thicker frame and the next state is marked by a dashed arrow together with the transition condition. All of these different views discussed so far are synchronized in time. The plot view draws charts derived from values of a basic search. For instance, if there is an event collecting the actual temperature, then it is possible to plot the temperature versus time. System Debugger has also a logmark view that can be used to bookmark events of special interest. Another feature is the ability to define and run assertions. An assertion is created by selecting first an event type, and then adding a constraint on one or more of its fields. As an example, an assertion can state that the temperature variable, which is collected from a specific type of events, is always less than 50 degrees. After running the created assertion, a view of all the events that violate the specified constraints will be displayed.
