A SYSTEM FOR VISUALIZING AND DEBUGGING DISTRIBUTED REAL-TIME SYSTEMS WITH MONITORING SUPPORT

Abstract

Based on system execution traces, this paper presents a dynamic approach for visualizing and debugging timing constraint violations occurring in distributed real-time systems. The system execution traces used for visualization and debugging are collected during the execution of a target program in such a way that its run-time behavior is not interfered with. This is made possible by our non-interference distributed real-time monitoring system which is capable of collecting system’s run-time traces by monitoring and fetching the data passing through the internal buses of a target system. After the run-time data has been collected, the visualization and debugging activities then proceeded. The timing behavior of a target program is visualized as two graphs—the Colored Process Interaction Graph (CPIG) and the Dedicated Colored Process Interaction Graph (DCPIG). The CPIG depicts the timing behavior of a target program by graphically representing interprocess relationships during their communication and synchronization. The DCPIG can reduce visualization and debugging complexity by focusing on the portion of a target program which has direct or indirect correspondence with an imposed timing constraint. With the help of the CPIG and the DCPIG, a timing analysis method is used for computing the system-related timing statistics and analyzing the causes of timing constraint violations. A visualization and debugging system, called VDS, has been implemented using OpenWindows on Sun-4’s/UNIX workstations.