Bill Lamie: Story of a Man and
his Real-Time Operating Systems

Embedded Systems Design and EE Times have published a fascinating article titled Bill Lamie: Story of a man and his real-time operating systems. This article provides a rare glimpse into how several popular RTOSes have been developed. Click here to read this insightful story.

Express Logic TraceX® 5.2 Speeds
Optimization and Debug

Express Logic has announced TraceX® 5.2, the latest version of its powerful real-time event trace program. As a graphical analytical program, TraceX 5.2 represents real-time system events so that developers can visualize precisely what their system is doing across any desired time interval. Advanced real-time granularity, search capabilities, and user interface improvements in TraceX 5.2 speed debug and optimization of real-time applications.

Similar to an aircraft “black box,” TraceX reveals system events immediately preceding a crash, helping developers to understand what caused the failure. Express Logic's ThreadX® RTOS creates a database of system and application events in a target-resident circular buffer, with time-stamping and active core-thread (for multicore systems) identification so they can be displayed later in the proper time sequence by TraceX. Trace information may be uploaded to the host for analysis by TraceX at any time whether at post mortem or on encountering a breakpoint. Acting as a “software logic analyzer” on the host, TraceX makes system events plainly visible, clearly identifying system bottlenecks or failures.

With TraceX 5.2, users gain more control over application analysis and control with features such as:

Advanced Searching—selecting a method of event search, users can “search by Context,” “Search by Object,” “Search by ID,” and “Search by Value”
Increased Granularity—By specifying the number of TraceX time-ticks per microsecond, users can produce a real-time scale of their target system. Extending this relationship throughout TraceX, all displays indicate actual time.
Color-coded Status Lines—visual representation mark time periods to depict threads that are “READY,” “SUSPENDED,” or “TERMINATED,” with different colors to quickly indicate the type of suspension (mutex, semaphore, etc.)
Report Action buttons—quick action buttons open reports such as Execution Profile, Performance Statistics, and Thread Stack Usage with a single click.
Customized Events—Users now can define a custom event icon to indicate an application event of particular interest.

“With our new TraceX Release 5.2, ThreadX developers gain increased visibility and control over their system during development, further speeding their time to market,” noted William E. Lamie, president of Express Logic. “These improved user features ensure that developers can easily customize TraceX to their application and gain tick-level granularity into the real-time behavior of their system. With debug and optimization taking up to 80% of most development projects, tools such as TraceX prove invaluable in meeting time-to-market deadlines.”

TraceX also provides the statistics and performance profiles that portray how the system is performing and to assist in fine-tuning its operation:

Execution Profile—shows the percentage of execution time spent in each application thread, interrupt routine, and system idle time
Popular Services—portrays which ThreadX services are most often used by the application
Thread Stack Usage—details the amount of stack memory used by each thread in the system, enabling better optimization of memory stack allocation and prevention stack overflow
Performance Statistics—counts the number of context switches, interrupts, priority inversions, and other critical events that occur during system operation

TraceX and TraceX MC for multicore environments are available for use on Windows PCs, at a license price of $1,000 per developer seat, with no license keys required.

Express Logic’s ThreadX® RTOS Selected for China’s Latest Smart Mobile Handsets

Leading 3G mobile phone suppliers opt for fully functional, single RTOS platform to improve cost and time to market

ThreadX’s event-chaining technology allows the application to "chain together" various system objects. With the ThreadX event-chaining technology it is very easy for a single thread to block on any number and/or type of system objects. For example, it is very easy for a single thread to suspend waiting for activity on any number of queues, semaphores, etc. Hence, complex system events are much easier to manage and by using less threads - saving both space and CPU cycles. Click here for the event-chaining tutorial.