Architectural support for debugging and monitoring real-time software

A two-phase approach for nonintrusive debugging of real-time programs is outlined. The first phase involves monitoring the program and the second phase is concerned with replaying the program to get identical behavior. The first phase is concentrated on in this paper, and some of the difficulties in nonintrusive monitoring are highlighted. Architectural modifications that must be made to the target processor to enable nonintrusive debugging are proposed. A memory scheme that enables nonintrusive checkpointing is described, and the authors explain how the architectural modifications coupled with the proposed memory scheme provide a framework for nonintrusive debugging.<<ETX>>