Debugging Real-Time Multiprocessor Systems

Technology trends are causing a paradigm shift in how computer systems are designed: instead of steadily getting faster single processors, the entire semiconductor industry is turning to multiprocessor designs to improve performance. Future real-time and embedded systems will be using multiple-processor hardware, and the software is expected to adapt to the situation. Writing parallel software programs is known to be very difficult and fraught with unexpected problems, and now parallel programming is expected to go mainstream.

This paper will discuss how to debug parallel software running on top of multiprocessor hardware, and the types of errors that occur due to parallelism. A range of techniques and tools are covered and the goal is to prime real-time and embedded software developers for multiprocessor integration and debugging.