|
|
A tale of lost print – On the importance of Positive Printing and how to do it correctly |
Debugging embedded systems can be very frustrating! Non-standard operative systems or compilers, limited resources and lack of tools – all make the process of debugging an embedded software much harder and complicated. One of the most powerful debug technics we still have in embedded system is debug prints. However, many embedded systems use them only to track basic system progress and to report on errors, missing the power of "positive printing" to get critical and meaningful data on the system behaviour. Another painful issue is their cost as debug prints impact code size and even in some systems also boot and runtime performance. In this presentation, Udy Hershkovitz will talk about the importance of "positive printing". He will show read-world scenarios were "positive printing" could have saved valuable time and resources. Finally, he will introduce simple but efficient mechanisms to optimize debug prints impact on production code. Udy Hershkovitz Udy Hershkovitz has been working at Intel for 20 years developing firmware for embedded security systems. As part of his role as a system architect, Udy has invested significant time and effort investigating methods and mechanisms to improve embedded software efficiency while keeping high level of system security and debug-ability. This infinite fight between trying to keep the code small, fast, and secured, while still allow easy and usable debug features led to several improvements on the area of debug and trace infrastructure, which some of them will be discussed in this presentation.
This presentation will address debug prints and the value of positive printing. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
