More and more embedded systems rely on the use of Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOSs) to: satisfy real-time requirements, reduce time-to-market, simplify development, increase code portability, and simplify development. Despite its many benefits, an RTOS also has its drawbacks, one of which is the possibility of introducing improperly assigned task priorities, stack overflows, starvation, deadlocks, priority inversions and other hard-to-find bugs.

In this three-part series, Jean Labrosse looks at tools specifically designed to help RTOS-based application developers uncover some of these elusive bugs, identify issues and offer corrective actions. These tools are readily available yet often unknown to embedded developers.

These series was originally posted on the Embedded Computing Design web site.

• Read Part 1: What is an RTOS? / CoreSight debug port / tools for debugging live systems
• Read Part 2: Stack overflow / interrupt response / priority inversions / deadlocks / starvation
• Read Part 3: Monitoring task and ISR execution times / measuring execution time