Publications on Model-Centric Debugging
Follow the links to access the papers and their presentation.
Programming-Model Centric Debugging for Multicore Embedded Systems
PhD Thesis
In this thesis, we propose to study interactive debugging of applications running on embedded systems Multi-Processor System on Chip (MPSoC). A literature study showed that nowadays, the design and development of these applications rely more and more on programming models and development frameworks. These environments gather established algorithmic and programming good-practices, and hence speed up the development process of applications running on MPSoC processors. However, sound programming models are not always sufficient to reach or approach error-free codes, especially in the case of dynamic programming, where they offer little to no help.
Our contribution to lighten these challenges consists in a novel approach for interactive debugging, named Programming Model-Centric Debugging, as well as a prototype debugger implementation. Model-centric debugging raises interactive debugging to the level of programming models, by capturing and interpreting events generated during the application execution (e.g. through breakpointed API function calls). We illustrate how we applied this approach to three different programming models, software components, dataflow and kernel-based programming. Then, we detail how we developed a debugger prototype based on GDB, for STMicroelectronics’s STHORM programming environment. STHORM development toolkit provides supportive environments for component, dataflow and kernel-based programming. We also demonstrate how to tackle software debugging with our debugger prototype through four case studies: an augmented reality feature tacker built with components, a dataflow implementation of the H.264 video decoding standard and two scientific HPC computing applications.
Interactive Debugging of Dynamic Dataflow Embedded Applications
HIPS 2013
Debugging parallel and concurrent applications is well-recognized as a time-consuming task, which often requires a significant part of the application development process. In the context of embedded systems, Multi-Processor-System-on-Chip (MPSoC) architectures feature numerous multicore processors which may be coupled with heterogeneous processors like Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) and/or application-specific accelerators. In this situation, it is important that developers are provided with high-level programming environments able to efficiently exploit these architectures, as well as suitable debugging tools.
Dataflow programming models were explicitly designed to program parallel architectures and they have the ability to abstract away heterogeneous computing complexity. In addition, the stream-processing aspect of multimedia algorithms naturally exhibits data-dependency graphs, which simplifies application design and implementation.
In this paper, we propose a new approach for interactive debugging of dataflow applications. Going beyond the long-established ability of interactive debuggers to support sequential programming languages, we describe the functionalities they should be able to provide to debug embedded and parallel dataflow applications. Then we demonstrate our solution to this problem with a proof-of-concept debugger targeting the dataflow framework used on an industrial MPSoC platform. We also explain the development challenges we faced during the implementation of this GDB-based debugger and illustrate its efficiency through a case study of a video decoder debugging session.
A Novel Approach for Interactive Debugging of Dataflow Embedded Applications
SAC 2013 (short paper + poster)
In this paper, we propose a new approach for source-level debuggers. Going beyond their long-established ability to support sequential programming languages, we describe the functionalities a debugger should be able to provide to debug embedded and parallel dataflow-based applications. Then we demonstrate our solution to this problem with a proof-of-concept debugger targeting the dataflow framework used on an \MPSoC platform. We also explain the development challenges we faced during the implementation of this GDB-based debugger and illustrate its efficiency though a case study of a video decoder debugging session.
Debugging Component-Based Embedded Applications
SCOPES 2012
With the advent of parallel architectures in the domain of embedded systems, developing applications fully adapted to their underlying platform becomes more and more complicated. Finding and fixing bugs in such environments is even trickier. Furthermore, current complex applications cannot be developed from scratch, only based on programming language primitives. They have to follow advanced programming models and their execution will be driven by the APIs of the key underlying libraries.
In this paper, we propose a new approach for source-level debuggers. Going beyond their long-established ability to support sequential programming languages, we describe the functionalities a debugger should be able to provide to debug embedded and parallel component-based applications. Then we demonstrate our solution to this problem with a debugger targeting the component framework used on an MPSoC platform. We also explain the development challenges we faced during the implementation of this GDB-based debugger and illustrate its efficiency though a case study of an image processing application.