Non-Intrusive Hardware/Software Monitoring for Single- and Multiprocessor Real-Time Systems

Run-time observability in hardware and software is a requirement for testing and debugging any computer system. In real-time systems, and in particular distributed such, it is however difficult to obtain observability without altering the system’s timing behaviour. Monitoring techniques using passive hardware have been used to extract software execution traces non-instrusively to the system. However, the passive hardware techniques such as in-circuit emulation, logic analysis, and oscilloscope, are not keeping pace with today’s system speeds (>200 MHz) and the highly integrated chips and circuit-boards that obstructs hardware probing. In this paper, we present MAMon1, a non-intrusive hardware-based monitoring system that can monitor logic-level and system-level events in single/multiprocessor real-time systems. The MAMon system integrates a hardware Probe-Unit on-chip (FPGA or ASIC) with a hardware-based Real-Time Kernel. The Probe-Unit collects, time-stamps, and transfers all events on the target, via a parallel cable, to a database on a host computer system. A monitoring tool environment, where the event-database is a central part, provides a structured framework for implementing debug and post analysis facilities. The paper will also describe the hardware-based Real-Time Kernel (RTU) and how MAMon connects to it in order to extract the system/process-level information non-intrusively.