Percepio announced 45-day free evaluation version of its Tracealyzer 4.4 trace diagnostics program, its first release to support embedded Linux.

At Embedded World in February, Percepio announced that its latest Tracealyzer 4.4 visual trace diagnostics release added support for embedded Linux. Two weeks before, Wind River announced it was making the software available with its latest version of Wind River Linux. As we read in Embedded Computing Design this week, Percepio has now launched an open beta test program for Tracealyzer 4.4.

Tracealyzer 4.4 running under Linux
(click image to enlarge)

Through Aug. 1 anyone can download a free 45-day evaluation license for Tracealyzer, which until now has worked only with real-time operating systems (RTOSes) such as FreeRTOS. The software provides tracing and trace visualization capabilities to better understand runtime behavior and make it easier to spot and understand bugs, says Percepio.

Tracelyzer can be integrated with popular debuggers such as IAR, Keil, or Eclipse, “complementing the detailed debugger view with several additional views on system level, ideal for understanding real-time issues where a classic debugger is not sufficient,” says the company. Percepio offers the example of a real-time motor control system, which is inconvenient to take offline for debugging. In this case, Tracealyzer lets you “record your embedded software and any variables of interest in real time as the system executes.”

Linux-oriented improvements in Tracealyzer 4.4 include:

• Visual Trace Diagnostics — tools for spotting anomalies in visual overviews and zooming in on bugs
• High-level overviews — top-down exploratory analysis, including process interactions and forking, state machines, user-defined metrics, and usage reporting for CPU, RAM, file, and I/O
• Trace view — now optimized for Linux traces usage, including large Linux images, adding support for process trees, forking, and system calls
• Flexible UI — user interface improvements including customizable window layout and ability to save and load multiple layouts for different use cases
• User-defined advanced analysis — adapable to specific use cases via customizable event interpretation, user-defined data sets such as Intervals and State machines, and highly configurable views
• Open standards — leverages CTF (Common Trace Format), using the open source LTTng tracing framework

Tracealyzer 4.4 supplies over 30 views of run-time behavior, including task scheduling and interrupt handler/ISR execution, task timing and priority, CPU load, and memory usage. Other views include interactions between tasks and interrupt handlers/ISRs such as message queue, semaphore, and mutex objects.

A custom logging feature for user events lets you analyze and debug the real-time behavior of algorithms such as motor control loops. Profiling views enable identification of system components that use the most resources, and memory usage views help track down leaks.

 
Further information

Tracealyzer 4.4 is available for free download through Aug. 1 with a 45-day beta test evaluation license. The final product will be released in the third quarter at an undisclosed price. More information may be found in Percepio’s announcement and the Tracealyzer product page. The evaluation download page may be found here.