Jakob Engblom

Debug, multicore, and more debug

I recently gave a talk at an industry-academia collaboration called ICES, Innovative Center for Embedded Systems, at KTH in Kista, Stockholm, Sweden. The theme was embedded multicore, and I realized that my role at these events seems to have changed. A few years ago, I would be the "embedded guy", defending the collective of embedded systems against speakers assuming that everything was a homogeneous shared-memory multiprocessor. This time was different, though. I have become the "debug fanatic".

Virtual Trace

I spent most of last week at the S4D conference in Southampton, the UK. A small gathering of people interested in debug, it seems to be a good indicator of trends in debug. The dominant trends this year were clearly tracing and instrumentation. From the perspective of a virtual platform, tracing is a natural task, and it can be done with much less pain than on a physical platform.