While there are mechanisms native to the Linux kernel to ensure that the functionality of a custom-written driver is correct, evaluating performance is not straightforward. Here's how you can use Tracealyzer for Linux to assess the performance and identify any deficiencies.
The French IGOSat project uses Tracealyzer to evaluate design decisions and debug onboard software, as the launch draws near. Percepio supports them with free academic licenses.
Västerås, Sweden, 1st September 2020 * * * Percepio, the leader in visual trace diagnostics for embedded systems and IoT, is pleased to announce that it will be hosting a Cypress IoT-AdvantEdge™ webinar on Thursday, 17th September 2020 at 9am PST (6pm CEST). Entitled “Closing the Loop On IoT Device Error Reporting”, the webinar outlines a strategy [...]
Good development methods and rigorous testing can eliminate most software bugs from an IoT device, but experience has shown that some bugs will remain. So you need to have a strategy for dealing with bug reports from your users once you start shipping the product. Join Percepio and Cypress for a webinar on Thursday 17 [...]
Percepio Tracealyzer and DevAlert have joined the list of “RA READY” technology solutions that can be deployed together with Renesas RA family of microcontrollers – right now. Renesas’ announcement from late July is here and they have also set up a partner page for Percepio. The Renesas Advanced (RA) 32-bit MCUs are built with Arm Cortex-M33, -M23 [...]
We have just released an update to Tracealyzer, labeled version 4.3.11, which adds support for RTX version 5.5 and also improves support for FreeRTOS. Users can download the new version from within Tracealyzer, or by visiting the Download page at percepio.com.
Percepio has closed of a 22 MSEK (2.3 MUSD) Series A funding round, led by Fairpoint Capital. The investment is intended to scale up operations and accelerate the product development.
Percepio announces an open beta test program for the upcoming Tracealyzer version 4.4, which provides much improved support for visualization and analysis of embedded Linux® software.
Software trace data has a massive potential for improving development for embedded and IoT software. Percepio is pioneering the area of Visual Trace Diagnostics, where the trace data is processed into a powerful model of the recorded system behavior. This enables a whole new level of visual analysis capabilities that improves developer productivity and software [...]
Our new cloud service for IoT device error reporting, Percepio DevAlert, has been designed from the beginning with security in mind.
Arm Keil and Percepio will host a joint webinar 11 June, 16.00 (CEST) – Software analysis of complex Cortex-M applications, with Reinhard Keil, Senior Director of Embedded Tools at Arm and Johan Kraft, Percepio CEO. In the past, debugging was all about run/stop debuggers and instruction trace. However, in complex embedded applications it can be difficult [...]
The Human-Machine interface is often the most visible aspect of a system, so it's critical that it performs as expected or users will surely notice. This one-hour webinar will demonstrate how Storyboard, the UI building tool from Canadian Crank Software, can be used along with Percepio Tracealyzer to analyze and optimise performance for common user [...]
Percepio migrated from SVN to Git about a year ago. If you are considering the same switch, we highly recommend it.
It is quite simple to extend Percepio's trace recorder library to work with a new processor. Today's article shows how to do it, using an Intel Nios II soft-core CPU as an example.
Version 4.3.8 of Tracealyzer updates the target-side recorder to work with the most recent version of FreeRTOS, v10.3, and adds two new hardware ports.
The goal was to minimize transmitted radio frequency distortions, under tight real-time deadlines. Using Tracealyzer, RFI Technology Solutions could evaluate various solutions before committing themselves.
Linux is a huge, and very different, beast compared to traditional RTOSes and other platforms we’ve supported with Tracealyzer in the past.
We got the question from a customer if we could host the Percepio License Manager server for them. And we thought – why not? That sounds like a good idea.
It could take our customer days to locate and fix a memory leak, but when they deployed Tracealyzer the same bug hunt was completed in a matter of hours.
Today at Embedded World 2020, Percepio announces Tracealyzer version 4.4 with new support for embedded Linux systems.
Percepio introduces new support for embedded Linux systems in Tracealyzer v4.4. This latest Tracealyzer version includes stunning visualization and analysis capabilities designed for embedded Linux application developers.
At Embedded World in Germany next week, Percepio will release DevAlert 1.0, the new name for the product we've talked about as Device Firmware Monitor during development and beta testing.
Percepio announces DevAlert, a ground-breaking cloud service for IoT product organizations that provides immediate awareness of firmware problems in deployed devices and visual diagnostic information to speed resolution.
Wind River has a major announcement today about Wind River Linux – and Percepio Tracealyzer is ready to help you debug and improve your WR Linux applications. Welcome to our booth #4-305 at Embedded World, where we will demonstrate our brand new Tracealyzer for Linux.
Check out this video interview and demo given by Percepio CEO and founder Dr. Johan Kraft, interviewed by Brandon Lewis from Embedded Computing Design.
Percepio CEO Johan Kraft and Reinhard Keil, Senior Director of Embedded Tools at Arm, will present modern techniques for debugging of embedded software in a joint presentation at Embedded World 2020 in Nuremberg.
At this year's Embedded World trade show, Percepio will show an updated Tracealyzer for embedded Linux, and also release Percepio DevAlert 1.0.
Printf calls are SLOW. Writing 25 bytes over a 115200 baud serial line takes a whopping 2 milliseconds, not counting any string formatting. This may change the system behavior and hide the problem you are chasing. This also means that printf calls can't be used in any time critical code, such as interrupt handlers. Additional [...]
Just before the holidays, we managed to push out the last Tracealyzer update of this decade. The main new thing in version 4.3.7 is that the recorder has been updated to be compatible with the latest release, v3.07.00, of µC/OS-III. Other than that, we have made various performance and stability improvements, and fixed one bug where [...]
Percepio has a special winter offer to developers: write about a real problem solved with Tracealyzer and get a free 1-year Tracealyzer license.
Walter Banks, an important figure in our embedded industry, died earlier this week. He was the founder of Byte Craft, a company that made C compilers for many earl 8-bit MCUs.
This week we released version 4.3.6 of Tracealyzer, a maintenance and bugfix release – we fixed about 50 minor issues in this one.
Developing with an RTOS can make it easier to design complex applications, but while an RTOS reduces the complexity of the application source code, it does not reduce the inherent complexity of the application itself.
Sometimes you need to step away from the daily grind and set aside time to study the patterns and structures that make up an embedded application. To meet that need, Percepio now offers two online courses in embedded development with a real-time operating system.
Percepio has announced the availability of Percepio RTOS Training, a set of online courses in embedded and IoT software development.
The easiest way to stream Tracealyzer traces from an RTOS is often via a SEGGER J-Link debug probe, using the RTT feature. This relies on a RAM buffer that is read by the J-Link probe while the target system is executing. This is usually fast and reliable, but in case you encounter issues, please check [...]
We have had a few customers asking us if they can use Tracealyzer to detect when a task holds two mutexes at the same time. The answer is yes, there are in fact several ways you can do this.
Welcome to meet with Percepio at Arm TechCon in San Jose, California, on 8–10 October. It will be three days packed with keynotes, technical sessions on all levels, and hands-on workshops. Percepio will not have a booth this year, but we are available for meetings and discussions throughout the event. Please contact our VP of Sales [...]
Together with our partner Renesas, we made a demo video of Percepio Device Firmware Monitor running on a Renesas AE-Cloud2 developer kit. The demonstration, which walks you through both Tracealyzer and DFM, is available as a free on-demand webinar from Renesas.
If you are into computer vision technology, Synopsys' ARC Processor Summit in Santa Clara, California, offers an opportunity to see Tracealyzer in action. The host company will have a demo booth where they show Tracealyzer for OpenVX, tracing targets built with their own EV6x vision processor family. The Summit is a free one-day event consisting of [...]
Over time, Percepio has built up a collection of Tracealyzer example projects and today we are releasing them to the public.
ST DevCon is an interactive summit, to be held on September 12, 2019 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. It will bring together experts in growth markets like Smart Things (IoT), Smart Driving, and Smart Home, City & Industry. Percepio will have a manned info kiosk at the conference, where you can go to look [...]
A clear indication that you may have a deadlock problem is when multiple tasks suddenly stop executing, although no higher priority tasks are running.
The central idea underlying an RTOS with a fixed-priority scheduler is that a high-priority task should be scheduled ahead of one with lower priority. Yet, as a developer you have to watch out for programming pitfalls that can result in inverted priorities.
When you have a task in your system that is supposed to execute at regular intervals, say for instance that it needs to read a sensor value every 5 milliseconds, then you have a system that is sensitive to random delays – also known as .jitter.
In embedded systems using multitasking, you may run into a situation where some of your tasks run slowly or not at all. This is called task starvation (the affected tasks are starved of CPU time) and it can happen for a number of reasons.
Percepio exhibited at the Embedded Vision Summit in May, and the show hosts were kind enough to come to our booth and ask for a quick presentation of Tracealyzer and its support for the OpenVX vision programming framework. We were happy to comply; watch the video here to hear what our CEO [...]
There is no doubt a learning curve when you begin using a real-time operating system (RTOS) in your development. Timing, scheduling et cetera will affect your code in ways that are not directly visible in the source code.
Richard Barry, the founder of FreeRTOS, gave a presentation on the future of FreeRTOS earlier this spring. He followed FreeRTOS to Amazon Web Services where he still oversees the project, and he could confirm that it is one healthy open source product.
Percepio sponsors several Student Racing Car teams with Tracealyzer licenses, mostly in Europe but today we present our first North American team: Purdue Electric Racing.
The Argentinian Air Force has developed a microsatellite, called µSAT-3. And Tracealyzer plays a small but important part in this national satellite project.
The Revolve team plans to compete in Hungary, Austria and Germany this summer. Team Revolve, a student team from NTNU (the Norwegian University of Science and Technology) in Trondheim, has revealed their electric cars for the 2019 competition season. Revolve is one of the top teams in the global Formula Student competition for [...]
Percepio is looking for a customer-facing engineer with solid skills in embedded software development. The main responsibility of this position is technical support, mainly pre-sales support.
Last week Percepio released Tracealyzer version 4.3 with many new features, such as a state machine detail view, stack usage analysis and data export. You will also see major performance improvement when working with very large traces.
Jean Labrosse, Silicon Labs Percepio is co-sponsoring the free Embedded Online Spring Conference on embedded software development on 22 May. Embedded consultant Jacob Beningo hosts the conference and the program includes a presentation on RTOS basics, benefits and drawbacks by Jean Labrosse of Micrium (nowadays Silicon Labs) fame – you don't want to [...]
Percepio announces Tracealyzer version 4.3 with new features for state machine analysis, stack usage analysis for Amazon FreeRTOS and major performance improvements when working with large traces.
Percepio will exhibit at the Embedded Vision Summit 2019 in Santa Clara, California, 20-23 May. The EV Summit is the primary event focusing on deployable computer vision for embedded systems – one of the hottest topics in the electronic industry right now. We'll talk about the work we have put in together with Synopsys to [...]
In this post we are going to dive deeper into Device Firmware Monitor and explain what it takes to set it up and how it can be used in a typical IoT application.
Are you using Tracealyzer today but find yourself wishing that we should have added that special missing feature? We hear you: over the next few months we are going to enable embedded and IoT developers to do many things themselves, without having to wait for new releases of Tracealyzer.
Percepio Senior FAE Niclas Lindblom will travel to India in June to present Tracealyzer at the annual Embedded Developer Conference hosted by our distributor Menlopark Technology. The conference will have at least eight different tracks, covering subjects like Compilers, Static and dynamic testing, and Embedded databases, and Menlopark says that all tracks will feature deep [...]
One of the many free academic licenses for Tracealyzer that Percepio has handed out this year went to Charles Sommer, research engineer on the AAReST project at Caltech in Pasadena, California. AAReST aims to construct a telescope that can be sent up in space in pieces and then assemble itself in orbit.
Next week in Taipei, Microtime arranges a seminar about embedded and IoT development, featuring both Amazon FreeRTOS and Tracealyzer. Save the date – 27 March. More info is available here; the registration form is here.
Percepio's Israeli distributor Sightsys is organising a one day training for Tracealyzer users in Tel Aviv 26 March. The day will among other things feature a technical presentation of Tracealyzer by Percepio FAE Niclas Lindblom, and a hands-on session with the software. Some of the other topics will be ThreadX versus FreeRTOS, and a new ST Micro [...]
NeoMore, our French distributor, organizes two sessions of a webinar addressing software developers using FreeRTOS, and expecting to accelerate the debugging and optimization of their application using FreeRTOS. Presented in French language by a senior application engineer. Details – registration for Wednesday 27 March at 11:00 CET Details – registration for Friday 29 March at [...]
Percepio is co-sponsoring the free Embedded Online Spring Conference on embedded software development on 22nd May. Embedded consultant Jacob Beningo hosts the conference; the program is still somewhat fluid but we do at least know that Jean Labrosse of Micrium (nowadays Silicon Labs) fame will hold a talk – you don't want to miss that. [...]
We have good news for the growing crowd of embedded Linux developers: the next step on the Tracealyzer 4 roadmap is proper support for Linux tracing, complete with live visualization and many other great features.
Computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra once said, “Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence”. No matter how much developers test their software, they just cannot prove that there are no bugs left.
We are ready to face another day meeting current and would-be customers. Oh – and we have a free T-shirt bonanza all day (as long as supplies last).
On Tuesday, FreeRTOS founder Richard Barry spoke to a packed room here at Embedded World about the future of Amazon FreeRTOS.
Our partner UltraSoc is demonstrating their new IDE UltraDevelop 2 in their booth, 3A-540, for the first time. The IDE is now available for beta testing.
Percepio Device Firmware Monitor has been awarded Best in Show at Embedded World 2019, in the Development Tools category.
In a previous post on the AWS Partner blog, Percepio CEO Johan Kraft showed how to get started with AWS IoT Core and Amazon FreeRTOS on the NXP OM40007 IoT kit using Percepio Tracealyzer for debugging support. This week, Johan is back with a follow-up, How to Solve Tricky Embedded IoT Challenges with Insightful Analysis, where [...]
Users of Express Logic ThreadX can now upgrade to Tracealyzer 4 and benefit from many of the new features we have been adding to the product over the last year.
Percepio announces Tracealyzer 4 support for Express Logic ThreadX.
Percepio has announced Percepio Device Firmware Monitor (DFM), a ground-breaking new cloud service for IoT product organizations that provides awareness of missed bugs and speeds up resolution.
Västerås, Sweden, 13th February 2019 * * * Percepio announces Percepio Device Firmware Monitor, a new cloud service for software quality assurance in IoT product organizations.
Percepio sponsors several Formula Student Racing Car teams with Tracealyzer licenses. Today, we meet the High Speed team from Karlsruhe who specialises in building combustion engine cars.
Percepio sponsor several Formula Student Racing Car teams with Tracealyzer licenses. Today, we have caught up with team Revolve from Trondheim, Norway, to hear about their thoughts, and their experiences with Tracealyzer.
Percepio sponsor several Formula Student Racing Car teams with Tracealyzer licenses. We caught up with three of them and thought we'd share their thoughts, and their experiences with Tracealyzer. Here is the first team. Running Snail from Germany.
Are you considering using Linux in your next embedded system project? If the answer is Yes, you may be interested in a free webinar that Percepio's Silicon partner Renesas hosts Friday, 25 January. Under the headline "Anatomy of an Embedded Linux System", the webinar takes on topics like the Linux kernel, file system and toolchain. More [...]
Within Tracealyzer's trace view, tasks, events and state machines are now organized into view fields, collections of tasks, intervals or events. In this post, we are going to examine how you can use those views to simplify working with Tracealyzer.
Menlopark Technologies, Percepio's brand new distributor in India, will participate at the Embedded Tech conference in New Delhi 28–31 January. They're in hall 7E, booth 10, so make sure to stop by and say hello if you are there.
Microtime Computer, our distributor in Taiwan, held a Tracealyzer seminar in December with about 40 attendees. Interest was high and compelled them to plan for three or four similar seminars during 2019. Way to go!
By default, the Tracealyzer Recorder Library allows for tracing two kinds of information: (1) RTOS kernel events such as context-switches and RTOS API calls, and (2) User Events in the application code, such as debug logging, state changes and variable values. With the release of Tracealyzer 4.2.9 we added a third way to trace [...]
Just in time for the winter break, we have released Tracealyzer 4.2.9 with some new improvements and bug fixes. Better support for large systems with many actors (tasks and ISRs), as the trace view can now hide inactive actors automatically. Tracealyzer will ask about enabling this feature if there are too many actors to fit [...]
Västerås, Sweden, 17th December 2018 * * * Percepio has joined the Embedded Vision Alliance, a worldwide industry partnership for companies engaged in enabling and developing applications for computer vision.
On December 6, Percepio released version 4.2.8 of Tracealyzer, with support for Wind River VxWorks. VxWorks users can now take advantage of the new features in Tracealyzer 4, the largest update ever to our flagship application.
If you've been thinking of purchasing Tracealyzer, now is a good time to place that order. If you order your Tracealyzer license before midnight 31 December we will include an end-of-year bonus: two years of free support and updates at no extra charge, rather than the customary one year.
Västerås, Sweden, 12th December 2018 * * * Percepio announces Tracealyzer 4 support for VxWorks.
In this post, we visualise the custom interval and state machine information available in Tracealyzer and explore how we can use it to better understand our application.
Tiny sensor devices are key elements in IoT systems, and they need to be as energy efficient as possible. Roberto Rodriguez-Zurrunero has successfully used Tracealyzer in his research to both minimise energy consumption and fine-tune timing.
Xilinx development kit ZC702 features a Zynq 7000 programmable SoC, lots of RAM and on-board I/O connectors ranging from HDMI to Gigabit Ethernet and USB. We set out to build a Tracealyzer demo application for this board, based on FreeRTOS and lwIP, with live trace streaming over Ethernet. During this work we discovered an interesting issue [...]
In the previous Hands On post we introduced the concept of intervals, which is the time between any two events and can be added to the timeline. In this post, we will take the interval one step further and see how we can use Tracealyzer to monitor state machines.
Embedded Online Fall Conference is a free online conference where industry experts talk about current issues in embedded development and present practical use cases. The day consists of five presentations, some of which are broadcast twice, and you register for each presentation separately; see links below. Percepio FAE Niclas Lindblom gives one of the presentations, [...]
Computer vision has become a core feature for all sorts of embedded systems. Therefore we have developed Tracealyzer for OpenVX, the world's first trace profiler for OpenVX and Embedded Vision/AI processors, in collaboration with Synopsys.
Västerås, Sweden, 26th October 2018 * * * Percepio, the leader in software trace visualization for embedded systems and IoT, announces a collaboration with Synopsys, providing interoperability between Percepio’s Tracealyzer and Synopsys’ DesignWare® ARC® Metaware EV Development Toolkit.
What if you want to visualize some application data in Tracealyzer, measure the time between two events or monitor a state machine? In this post, we will show how you can set up this kind of custom logging.
Embedded evangelist and consultant Jacob Beningo offers two "Technology Primer" online courses during 2019, and both will feature Tracealyzer. Debugging Techniques takes off with "Developing a personal debugging process" in January and proceeds to cover subjects like printf(), ITM tracing, visualization and static code analysis.The other one, Armv8-M TrustZone Technology, introduces the TrustZone security architecture and [...]
Percepio has just released Tracealyzer 4 for one more RTOS platform: On Time RTOS-32. We build upon the tracing library included in RTOS-32, which enables users to trace kernel operations such as scheduling, task communication and interrupts. If you use Tracealyzer with RTOS-32 today, contact your nearest distributor or drop a mail to sales@percepio.com to [...]
Good news! We have now updated both the Eclipse plugin and the Atmel Studio 7 plugin for Tracealyzer 4, making it even easier to analyze and debug RTOS-based software using Tracealyzer. The Eclipse plugin works with most Eclipse-based IDEs for Arm-based MCUs, such as Atollic TrueStudio, MCUXpresso, Simplicity Studio, etc. Both plugins support snapshot tracing of FreeRTOS, [...]