Security Featured Article

Tustin, Calif.-based Arium, a provider of hardware-assisted development tools, recently announced the release of debugging technology supporting Linux OSs.

 

The technology offers substantial improvements for Intel-based software and firmware development assisting engineers to bring designs to market faster and with higher quality, according to the company.

 

In addition to early design wins in embedded applications for Intel (News - Alert) Atom processor-based MIDs, Arium said this latest offering is also intended to secure other mobile devices in North America, Europe, and Linux OS-rich markets such as China.

 

“As embedded Linux becomes more pervasive on Intel architecture, engineers demand higher level of visibility and control. Arium is providing new technology in the marketplace to meet this demand,” said Larry Traylor, CEO at Arium. He added that the company decided to step up and provide a new paradigm for debugging in the Linux environment.

 

The developers using tools with other embedded OSs are used to advanced GUI tools, including IDEs to debug board support packages, OS kernels, device drivers, and applications.

 

With the introduction of the ECM-XDP3 JTAG emulator and the SourcePoint 7.7.1 debugger supporting Intel Atom processors, programmers get a complete seamless Linux debug environment, said officials.

 

Typically, the Linux development is done using command-line debug methodologies and/or debug hooks coded into source. Officials said that until now no tool source offered developers the ability to debug from board reset all the way through threaded applications.

 

Some of the benefits of hardware-assisted debugging are flash programming, non-intrusive real-time target operation, complete visibility after a hardware catastrophic event, real-time code execution trace, and hardware programming when code is not available.

 

The new JTAG-based Linux OS-aware technology is available now. Officials said that the Arium solution works with popular Linux builds including Moblin, MontaVista Linux, Wind River (News - Alert) Linux, and all 2.6 versions from Kernel.org.