Lauterbach, the world’s leading supplier of debug tools, is pleased to announce the extension of their TRACE32® debugger to include support for SYSGO’s latest release of PikeOS, version 5.0. The support contains additional features for debugging PikeOS native applications as well as APEX and POSIX guest operating systems. At the same time, even hypervised guests using PikeOS’ hardware virtualization can be inspected and examined.
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 object, such as partitions, tasks and threads. TRACE32 includes full MMU support giving 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. With the latest version, Lauterbach has extended the awareness to include the new PikeOS 5.0 release.
PikeOS provides partitions that host guest operating systems that conform to POSIX and ARINC 653 (APEX). TRACE32 adds views showing the APEX processes and POSIX threads of each guest OS, in addition to the PikeOS based tasks and threads. The developer gets a quick overview of the entire system, including the internals of any utilized guest OS.
PikeOS acts as a hypervisor, using the hardware virtualization capabilities of the latest CPU architectures. Such a system can contain complete OSes as guests, e.g. Linux or even native PikeOS. TRACE32 is able to detect and access the virtualized guests through its special hypervisor awareness The developer can even load another OS awareness to see and access the processes and threads of the guest. The end result is that everything can be debugged at the same time: the PikeOS host with all guests, including their processes and threads. If the CPU architecture and board provide a way to perform hardware-based tracing (e.g. Arm ETM), TRACE32 is able to capture the program flow and task/thread switches of PikeOS and any supported guest operating systems. This provides for a detailed performance analysis at the task, thread or function level and enables the developer to create a fully comprehensive code coverage analysis.
SYSGO and Lauterbach will continue their partnership to ensure seamless interoperability between PikeOS and TRACE32.