Execution trace‐based model verification to analyze multicore and real‐time systems

Abstract

As a key part of model‐driven development, modeling allows users to represent the application workflow or to automatically generate source code. This is convenient for developers, particularly to create or improve real‐time applications embedded in complex systems. Multicore systems are difficult to debug because the concurrently running processes can interfere with each other. In real‐time systems, timing constraints add to the complexity, invalidating results when a deadline is missed. Tracing is usually the most accurate and reliable tool to study the runtime behaviour of those applications. However, the interpretation of voluminous detailed execution traces requires a deep understanding of the operating system and application behaviour, and time to dig through the millions of trace events.In this paper, we present the use of model‐based constraints on top of user‐space and kernel traces to provide weighted analysis results. Our algorithms have been applied to multiple traces showing common problems for multi‐core real‐time systems. The experimental results show that our algorithms can quickly identify many different types of problems with a low runtime, even for traces with millions of events, thus helping to save time when analyzing thousands of trace events for complex systems.