Eclipse-Based Tool Suite Supports Embedded Linux Developers

March 13, 2013

Intel's System Studio accelerates time to market for embedded developers with tools that address parallel programming and power management.

William G. Wong

Intel's System Studio targets the embedded developer. It combines many of the individual tools that Intel has provided from system analyzers to advanced debuggers. It integrates with the open source Eclipse IDE providing full cross-platform development support. System Studio runs on a range of platforms including Windows and Linux.

One of the major components of the system is the GDB debugger (Fig. 1) that is optimized for the Intel 64 and IA -32 architectures. It includes new feature such as a low overhead ability to detect race conditions . It is even possible to set a breakpoint to determine when this condition is detected. It requires instrumentation by the compiler. The features are open source but they have yet to move into other GDB debuggers.

Figure 1. Intel's enhanced GDB debugger adds support for detecting threading errors.

The debugger can also take advantage of the System Visible Event Nexus (SVEN) technology. It is an instrumentation and API for collecting real-time, full-system visible software “event traces.” The debugging (Fig. 2) handles trace decoding or it can be done using a separate trace processing application. The trace system has user configured records and utilizes an in-memory circular buffer that can be read by JTAG.

Figure 2. The System Visible Event Nexus (SVEN) technology provides low overhead instrumentation for tracing application code.

The package contains Intel's VTune Amplifier and Inspector. The Inspector addresses race conditions, deadlocks, memory leaks and unallocated memory. It supports embedded Linux including Fedora, Wind River and a growing list of embedded Linux distributions.

The VTune Amplifier (Fig. 3) addresses power utilization. It handles multicore performance analysis including of CPU and GPU activities. Some of the activity it identifies includes events that cause a system to wake-up and what timers are triggered by an application. The system can displayCPU core frequencies and events.

Figure 3. Intel's VTune Amplifier provides power profiling support to help developers reduce overall power requirements by manipulation core frequencies via an array of power modes.

Intel's C++ compiler is part of the package and supports the instrumentation features of System Studio. The compiler supports the Atom, Core and Xeon processors from Intel. It supports Intel's Cilk Plus enhancements and it is compatible with GCC. This includes support for the Yacto Project.

The Intel Integrated Performance Primitives (IPP) library is available to developers. It has been expanded to include embedded Linux OS support. The Linux OS support also extends to the Math Kernel Library (MKL). This library provides functions for linear algebra, signal processing and addresses sparse solvers. The libraries are distributed in object form.

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.