11.7 Software Debugging in The Target – Combined Hardware/Software Techniques

11.7.1 Host/Target Interactive Debugging – Software Tracing

Having a monitor program in the target makes it possible to debug the target software interactively from the host machine. However, monitor-based methods are intrusive; thus, they intrinsically limit the quality and quantity of real-time data that can be gathered in a debugging session. The hardware-based methods described earlier get around this problem. Using these, we can obtain runtime information that just could not be accessed using a simple monitor. But they don't allow us to automatically compare source code aspects with the actual running code. If we could do that, though, we would end up with a greatly improved interactive real-time debugging capability. The only way to achieve such a goal is to combine hardware and software, forming a software trace debugger, as shown in Figure 11.39. The concept is to debug by examining...