ARM's impressive trace makes debug a snap

10/7/2008 9:00 AM EDT

ARM's latest tool suite, RVDS 4.0, has a ton of great new features. The trace and profile features are particularly noteworthy. Plenty of tools offer real-time program trace, but RVDS takes things farther by providing detailed, real-time analysis of the trace. As shown below, the tool reports a variety of statistics in real time, including:

• Memory reads and writes
• Function calls per sec
• Interrupts per sec
• CPU utilization
• Code coverage

The real-time reporting of this data is a huge plus. For example, suppose some part of your code has a problem that causes a spike in memory accesses. Because you can immediately see the spike, you can tell where you where when things went wrong—no more guessing at the source of your problem.

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Figure 1. The RVDS 4.0 trace feature tracks a wide range of statistics in real time.

ARM makes this process even easier with its new trace replay capabilities. This feature lets you store up to 1 TB of data—according to ARM, that equals up to 10 days of trace data. The trace replay does much more than just show you the path of your program—it keeps statistics for every instruction, letting you quickly pinpoint any trouble spots.

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Figure 2. The trace replay provides statistics for each instruction.

RVDS 4.0 has lots of other great features, and I'm quite impressed by it. The tool suite is definitely worth checking out.