Art Lee and Bruce Ableidinger
Viosoft and MIPS Technologies

Linux has taken the embedded Real Time Operating System (RTOS) space by storm. More and more applications that historically required either a commercially available RTOS or one that was internally created and maintained are being replaced with Linux-based platforms. As OEMs take advantage of the Linux OS, they are restricted by the typical debug model. This paper describes the limitations and challenges of today's accepted Linux debug environment, and how new tools and technologies provide a holistic approach to debugging Linux. Find out how you can overcome debug challenges including those with loadable modules, debugging multiple processes and parent/child processes, and debugging kernel drivers and shared libraries; as well as how new Linux profiling and analysis tools can provide a level of code quality that until now was not obtainable.