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Product category: Design and Development Software
News Release from: Green Hills Software | Subject: TimeMachine
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 4 September 2003

Debugger enters the fourth dimension

The TimeMachine 4D debugger is a novel combined hardware and software tool claimed to give developers unprecedented visibility into their program execution

TimeMachine is the first debugger to provide developers with complete visibility into an application's precise behaviour both forwards and backwards in the time dimension. The new 4D debugger gives developers the ability to run and step an application back in time after a failure occurs, allowing easy identification of its root cause.

This avoids the tedious and open-ended process of trial-and-error debugging required by previous generations of debuggers.

TimeMachine exploits the power of the Green Hills Supertrace probe to collect up to 1Gbyte of trace data - more than 20 times the typical trace depth of other probes.

SuperTrace works with trace ports running at speeds beyond 300MHz, collecting trace data while the CPU executes at full speed.

SuperTrace probe's extreme trace depth and high speed allows developers to nonintrusively log trace data for significant periods of execution time.

Green Hills' new debugging tool includes CodeReplay technology, an enhancement to the Multi integrated development environment that uses the trace reconstruction to drive a debugging session that can move forwards and backwards in time as needed.

Once an interesting point in execution is discovered, the developer can single step forwards and backwards, view variables and registers, and use Multi's integrated code browsing tools to gain a complete understanding of what happened.

Additionally, TimeMachine's PathAnalyzer displays the sequence of function calls that occur in call stack order, allowing the examination of the flow of execution at high level or individual low level function calls.

Consequently, the complex interactions of the system, including execution of application code, interrupt service routines, and context switches are brought to light.

Developers can search for sequences of events that point out anomalies such as a failure to meet a real-time deadline.

The TimeMachine tools are all powerfully integrated so stepping through execution using CodeReplay simultaneously causes the PathAnalyzer to focus on the same point in time.

TimeMachine is also integrated with the Multi EventAnalyzer operating system analysis tool and the patented Multi Performance and Code Coverage Profiler.

Traditional operating system analysis and profiling tools require intrusive instrumentation and data logging.

TimeMachine, however, mines the trace data for operating system events such as kernel service calls and exceptions, providing the same real-time view of production code, built without any instrumentation.

TimeMachine is virtual-memory aware, enabling developers to visualise code execution across any thread within any memory address space.

The Green Hills processor simulators, including the Isim simulator for the Integrity RTOS, support generation of trace data for use with TimeMachine.

Thus, developers can take advantage of this debugging technology when hardware is scarce or the CPU lacks a trace port.

TimeMachine is designed to work with the Multi IDE version 4.0 which will be available in Q4 2003.

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