[SOLVED] Use SystemView with embos version 3.62a

KeesdeBoer · Apr 10th 2020, 10:04am

Good day,

I want to try SystemView on one of our product because we have some strange behaviour once in a while... But our embos version we use is 3.62a. In read that the minimal embos version required is v4.12a. Is there an old(er) version of SystemVieuw available or are there other workarrounds for it?

b.t.w.: Updating the embos version is not a realistic option for us.

Cheers,
Kees

SEGGER - Nino · Apr 14th 2020, 11:11am

Hello Kees,

Thank you for your inquiry.
Older embOS versions than 4.12a are not instrumented by SystemView which is why it does not work with that older versions.
If you have a embOS source buyout you can of course instrument embOS yourself as explained in the SystemView manual.

Could you elaborate why you need SystemView in your setup? if it is for debugging maybe other debug features/techniques may be helpful as well.
What target device are you debugging exaclty?
Could you elaborate why updating embOS is not a viable option for you?

Best regards,
Nino

KeesdeBoer · Apr 14th 2020, 11:52am

Hi Nino,

Thank you for your reply. The reason we want to try SystemView is that we have some strange behaviour with products in the field. The product is 10 years old and in 99% of the cases it works perfect. It’s a system that’s collecting data from a Bluetooth node with a data rate of 100 messages per second (100 bytes per message). With some of our systems, we see that the message receive rate drops from 6000 message/minute to 5500 message/minute. After a few minutes the system resets itself.

A guess from my side is the CPU usage of the system. Now, we don’t have a clue how much CPU the system is using. By using the SystemView we want to see if we use our processor for >95% or maybe the half of its capacity, we just don’t know. With Systemview we want to get some knowledge on our own system.

Unfortunately, we don’t have a embOS source buyout. The target device is the LPC2468. I work with a very old version of IAR (5.4) with an included RTOS powerpack. Because the project is quite old, we don’t want to take a lot of effort by updating the system to a higher embOS version (I don’t think that could be done for free), including the resulting testwork etc, etc.

Any advice would be very appreciated.

Cheers,
Kees

SEGGER - Nino · Apr 14th 2020, 2:41pm

Hello Kees,

The LPC2468 is ARM7 architecture which unfortunately lacks some debug features that SystemView is utilizing to transfer the data to J-Link. So even if you get SystemView running on your platform you could do only a single shot recording which will be only a very short recording as continuous recording is not supported on ARM7.

What you could to is use either Ethernet or UART as the I/O channel between your target and e.g. SystemView. But in that case you create additional overhead in your target application just to stream the SystemView data out of your target device.
Also this would require an instrumented application which your currently used embOS version is not.

The easiest approach to solve this would be to update the embOS. The API stayed backwards compatible so there should not be much, if any, changes needed when upgrading.
Pricing for embOS can be found here:
segger.com/purchase/pricing/embos/

In this case the object license is sufficient and will give you the same versatility that you got with the embOS version received in the powerpack.

Other than that there are no other ways known to us to do a CPU usage analysis on ARM7 targets.

Best regards,
Nino

KeesdeBoer · Apr 14th 2020, 4:52pm

Hi Nino,

Thank you for your reply, information and advice. I will see what we can do.

Cheers,

Kees

SEGGER - Martin · Apr 15th 2020, 9:47am

Hi Kees,

As Nino explained, embOS v3.62 would need to be instrumented for using SystemView on it, which may only be done when having access to the source code.
However, if you're interested in CPU load exclusively, there might be an alternative that was available in v3.62 already: embOSView. embOSView displays the CPU load per task and thus could be used as an indicator on whether you're exceeding the devices capacities. For more information on embOSView, please refer to the generic embOS manual UM01001: with v3.62, all relevant information on this is contained in chapter 20, "embOSView: Profiling and analyzing".

Best regards,
Martin

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