Tracealyzer Version 4.4 offers support for embedded Linux

News | October 15, 2020

By Ally Winning

IoT MPUs/MCUs Software & Embedded tools

Percepio Tracealyzer provides visual top-down exploratory analysis to bring more insight to software debugging and verification at system level. The analysis makes it simpler to find issues during full system testing, and drill down into the details to find the cause. The latest version of the software adds several new views that have been optimized for Linux tracing to the already large set of visualizations that are already present in Tracealyzer. It also uses CTF, the Common Trace Format, and the widely supported LTTng open source tracing framework.

New features for Linux include:

Signals and Syscalls Explorer is an index over the trace that shows how each thread, process and process tree interacts with the Linux kernel through syscalls, and how signals are generated and delivered.
The Communication Flow view has been optimized for Linux and shows a visual graph over the process interactions with respect to file descriptors, signals and pipes.
An Actor Tree field in the main trace view gives a visualisation of how processes and threads are spawned over time, including their parent/child relations.

Percepio CEO and founder Dr. Johan Kraft comments: “Percepio Tracealyzer is firmly established as the leading solution for visual trace diagnostics in the RTOS space. Linux is the single largest platform for embedded and IoT systems today and has an even greater need for better debugging support at system level. We are therefore thrilled to release an even better version of Tracealyzer that is now also optimized for the needs of embedded Linux developers.”

Other improvements for Linux developers:

Quick Zoom allows users to quickly zoom in by holding down the Ctrl key while dragging the mouse pointer over an interval.
A rich set of high-level overviews for top-down exploratory analysis, including process interactions, process forking, CPU usage, RAM usage, I/O usage, file usage, state machines and user-defined metrics.
A powerful trace view for showing details, scalable for large Linux traces with respect to both responsiveness and clarity.
A modern and flexible user interface allows users to customize the window layout. Save and load multiple layouts to suit each use-case.
User-defined advanced analysis – Adapt Tracealyzer to specific use cases via customizable event interpretation, user-defined data sets such as Intervals and State machines and display in highly configurable views.