Visualization of Message Passing in an Embedded System

Abstract

Debugging process communication in embedded systems can be a very complex and time consuming task, especially when dealing with non-determinism. The traditional approach is to use print statement debugging or text logs, but these methods do not cater well to the parallel nature of concurrent systems. In this thesis we research ways to capture messages in a speci c embedded system at Ericsson, and general guidelines on how to best do so in general. We then research and propose a number of visualizations of message passing and argue about their various strengths and weaknesses. Further, we select one visualization and detail the design and implementation of Threadmill, a tool aiming to help developers understand and debug process message communication. We conclude that the developed visualization, a variant of UML sequence diagrams, shows great promise when debugging message passing applications.