macrobug
Macrobug Symbian OS Tracer
Macrobug's Symbian OS Tracer guides your engineers through a maze. The maze is the interactions of different software subsystems on a Symbian OS device.
All the trickiest bugs involve interaction of different software systems. Usually, they occur at the end of the phone project, just when you're trying to ship. Most of the developers' time is spent simply reading code to try to understand how the control flow skips around between different bits of software. This is particularly tricky on Symbian OS, thanks to the use of an efficient - but confusing - technique called Active Objects. Nearly all Symbian OS code runs within an Active Object. When your engineer is staring at some code, they know they're running in an Active Object - but they can't tell who triggered that Active Object to run. Without reading acres of code, the developer can only speculate.
If your engineer is looking at an error message in a messaging application, all they know is that some messaging engine function failed. They don't know that it was caused by a failure in the networking stack. They certainly don't know that the networking stack failure was caused by a modem software problem. And they'd never speculate in a million years that the modem software problemwas caused by a rogue interrupt from the DSP. This sort of thing takes days to debug.
Macrobug's Symbian OS Tracer changes that. It gives the engineer an overview of every active object running in every thread - and most importantly, how they have interacted with each other. Your engineers have a roadmap showing exactly what's happened all the way back in time.
Suddenly the hardest bugs take minutes not days.
To scroll this SVG image if you don't see scrollbars: hold down Alt or Shift and drag. Bear in mind that SVG display still isn't very good in some browsers - take a look at the PDF example if you're seeing oddities.
Features
- Automatic construction of sequence diagram showing every event in every thread over time
- Interactive event list view within Eclipse IDE ('expand' and 'contract' each event to show or hide related events, and details about that event)
- PDF and SVG export - both vector-based for small file sizes and high-quality printing
- Display of active objects
- Display of current CPU ownership
- Display of synchronous waits
- Display of DFCs and interrupt handlers
- Request completions shown as event relationships within or between threads
- IPC messages shown as event relationships between threads
- Active object setting active shown as relationship between events within a thread
Availability
The Symbian OS Tracer is not available to download. It's intended only for device manufacturers: please get in touch with Macrobug to discuss pricing and arrange for a demonstration of the tool on your software stack.
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 SVG Example Output |
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