To excel in embedded development in 2023, it is essential to have a solid understanding of build systems, continuous integration, and deployment strategies. This workshop by Percepio training partner Jacob Beningo aims to provide a comprehensive primer on these practices, equipping participants with the knowledge and skills necessary to tackle complex firmware projects with confidence.
Percepio Tracealyzer is available for many popular real-time operating systems (RTOS), including FreeRTOS, Zephyr, and Azure RTOS ThreadX, and also for Linux. But what if you want to use it for another RTOS, one that Percepio doesn’t provide an integration for? Then you’ve been out of luck—until now.
Tracealyzer. You can’t stay in the wonderful world of debugging and profiling code without hearing the name. If you look at Percepio’s website, it is compared to the oscilloscopes of embedded code. Use it to peek deep inside your code and see what it does. Of course, the code receives an interrupt and checks a CRC before sending the data through SPI, but how does it do it? And how long does it take?
Using Tracealyzer to view applications running on Zephyr RTOS comes with a special challenge: unlike some other microcontroller-oriented real-time operating systems, Zephyr exposes its kernel services via a syscall layer. A syscall is essentially a way to programmatically communicate with the operating system kernel from user level code.
Tracealyzer version 4.8 has just been released, with major optimizations and improvements for Zephyr RTOS, and support for 64-bit target processors (FreeRTOS, Zephyr and SafeRTOS only). In addition, the ESP32 support is upgraded to use the latest TraceRecorder library, supporting all recent versions of ESP-IDF up to v5.2 dev. Snapshot tracing is now primarily supported by the implementation for streaming mode, using the RingBuffer stream port.
Tracealyzer version 4.8 will be released in the first week of June, with major optimizations and improvements for Zephyr RTOS, and support for 64-bit target processors (FreeRTOS, Zephyr and SafeRTOS only). In addition, the ESP32 support is upgraded to use the latest TraceRecorder library, supporting all recent versions of ESP-IDF up to v5.2 dev. Snapshot tracing is now primarily supported by the implementation for streaming mode, using the RingBuffer stream port.
Tracealyzer® version 4.7 in now available for download and evaluation. This is a big feature update with several new capabilities and major improvements.
When debugging an RTOS-based system, tracing can often give a better understanding of the real-time behavior of your system. Percepio Tracealyzer supports two main types of RTOS tracing, snapshot and streaming, both offering the same powerful visualization although streaming allows for collecting longer traces. The Percepio trace recorder offers several options to allow developers to adjust the tracing setup to fit their target system and their analysis needs.
The use of a Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) is increasingly common in embedded software designs. An RTOS makes it easy to divide your code into smaller blocks, tasks, which execute seemingly in parallel and independent of each other, as described in the first article in the RTOS 101 series.
We just released Tracealyzer version 4.6.4. Users with a current support contract can upgrade from within the application, or by going to the update page and download the right binary for their platform.
