Reproducible builds have become a cornerstone of modern embedded development. They provide confidence that a specific source-code baseline and toolchain produce a known firmware artifact, creating a traceable path from source code to deployed software.
Embedded engineers regularly encounter failures that are difficult to reproduce despite using the same firmware image throughout testing. A system may pass hundreds of test cycles before a watchdog reset occurs, a communication stack may hang only after many hours of operation, or a latency spike may appear intermittently and then disappear in subsequent runs.
In these situations, the firmware itself has not changed. What differs is the execution context in which the firmware runs. Small variations in input timing, interrupt arrival patterns, task scheduling, hardware state, resource availability, or environmental conditions can influence the sequence of events that unfolds during execution.
What is often missing is equivalent visibility into runtime execution. When a system-level failure occurs, teams can usually identify exactly which firmware image was running, but not necessarily what sequence of events led to the failure. For intermittent and timing-sensitive failures, engineers are often left reconstructing hypotheses from partial information, adding instrumentation after the fact, and rerunning tests in the hope of reproducing the same conditions.
Percepio Tracealyzer provides visual insight into runtime execution, allowing engineers to correlate task scheduling, timing, and system events to understand how software actually behaved during operation
Continuous observability (CO) extends the audit trail into runtime execution. Rather than treating observability solely as a debugging technique, it becomes an ongoing capability that captures execution data throughout development, integration, testing, and validation.
Dr. Johan Kraft, Founder and CTO at Percepio AB
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