Grasp: Tracing, visualizing and measuring the behavior of real-time systems

TLDR

Real‑time systems’ timing behavior is hard to validate, and most operating systems and development environments lack robust tracing, visualization, measurement, and analysis support. The paper introduces Grasp, a tool for tracing, visualizing, and measuring real‑time system behavior. Grasp implements a simple plugin infrastructure that allows custom visualization and measurement methods to be added. Grasp’s functionality was demonstrated while developing extensions for µC/OS‑II, and all related tools are open source and freely available online.

Abstract

Understanding and validating the timing behavior of real-time systems is not trivial. Many real-time operating systems and their development environments do not provide tracing support, and provide only limited visualization, measurements and analysis tools. This paper presents Grasp, a tool for tracing, visualizing and measuring the behavior of real-time systems. Grasp provides a simple plugin infrastructure for extending it with custom visualization and measurement methods. The functionality of Grasp is demonstrated based on experiences during the development of various real-time extensions for the commercially available µC/OS-II real-time operating system. All the tools presented in this paper are open source and freely available on the web.