Introduction

1.1 What WindView Can Do for You

Your real-time system consists of the VxWorks operating system, your real-time application, and the target hardware. The system involves complex interactions among tasks, interrupts, and VxWorks system objects (including message queues and semaphores). These interactions must occur within certain time constraints, often characterized by resolutions of microseconds or finer.

While common tools for debugging and benchmarking real-time systems, such as source-level debuggers and profilers, can provide much useful information about a system, they provide only a static picture of a dynamic situation. WindView acts as a logic analyzer for real-time software. It allows you to study the dynamic interactions of all the elements of your complex system.

Visualization

WindView displays the dynamic information about your real-time system in a view graph window, shown in Figure 1-1.

Figure 1-1: WindView View Graph

The view graph provides manageable access to a wealth of information about the real-time system. With this window, you can scroll the information forward and backward in time and zoom in and out to different time scales. You can tailor the display to contain only the tasks and events you need to study.

Focus

WindView provides tools to collect exactly the data you need. You can specify several levels of detail. You can use the triggering facility to start and stop data collection so that data is collected from a precise interval under precise conditions. You can manage data upload to the host to optimize your system resources. You can create your own application-specific events to provide precise information on a unique condition. You can use pre-packaged analysis tools to relate calculated information to specific system events.

Problem Solutions

Because it provides a view into the complex activities of a real-time system, WindView allows you to do the following:

Detect race conditions, deadlocks, CPU starvation, and other problems relating to task interaction.

Determine application responsiveness and performance.

See cyclic patterns in application behavior.

Save data for deferred analysis.

Conduct post-mortem analyses of failed systems.

Throughout this manual examples are given to demonstrate configuring and using WindView to solve real-life problems.