Web Server Based Tools

Case Study: Post-mortem System State Analysis

A client required a tool to provide a stack backtrace from core-dump information while developing a new hard disk drive. It was soon recognized that the same tool could be used to extract a complete listing of all the variables that were saved in the memory dump to disk, with the values at the time the disk controller code decided to halt execution and report an error.

CodeSprite worked with ARM to enhance the information provided by ARM's fromelf utility. CodeSprite's Danalyze program can now run fromelf to extract all the symbolic information required from the hard disk drive's elf-format object file, and create a debugger script that extracts the saved values of each variable.

Danalyze executes ARM's fromelf and armsd utilities completely autonomously, and formats the values returned into an html web page with collapsed expandable array and structure trees, allowing variables of interest to be quickly located in the sorted variable list even in the largest projects.

Putting Danalyze on a web server allowed multiple engineers to access the program simultaneously without having to install new software locally - a program was already available to read binary data from the device under test and save it into a file. The data file and elf image of the program under test is uploaded via a web page on the web server. If it is already released, the elf image can be read from a database rather than having to be uploaded from the engineer's pc.