Design and implementation of a remote debugger for concurrent debugging of multiple processes in embedded linux systems

Abstract

In the embedded software development environments, developers can concurrently debug a running process and its child processes only by using multiple gdbs and gdbservers. But it needs additional coding and messy works of activating additional gdb and gdbserver for each created process. In this paper, we propose an efficient mechanism for concurrent debugging of multiple remote processes in the embedded system environments by using the library wrapping mechanism without Linux kernel modification. Through the experimentation of debugging two processes communicating by an unnamed pipe in the target system, we show that our proposed debugging mechanism is easier and more efficient than preexisting mechanisms. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2004.