Reliable Embedded Systems

(More) Busting Bugs from Birth to Death of an Embedded System running an RTOS

Save time, money and nerves by using the right "down to the earth debugging philosophy" depending on the problem you want to tackle while running your application on top of an RTOS and even before that. As much as you wish it to be otherwise, it's a fact, that most non trivial programs contain bugs. The growing complexity of embedded systems is making them buggy, and the later in the development phases bugs are detected the more costly it gets to eliminate them. We will start our journey with an introduction to real-time operating systems which contains, among other things, an explanation of the memory model utilized by C compilers, inter process communication mechanisms and the notion of processes/threads. After we reach a common understanding of these key concepts we'll enumerate typical development phases of an embedded system and discuss what can be done in each of them in order to deal with bugs starting from requirements gathering to after sales support. We'll highlight various methods and tools to fight bugs, when and how they can be applied, and will end the presentation by exploring the art of debugging dynamic systems. The mantra is simple: "It's cheaper to avoid bugs than to debug systems!"