I saw yesterday demo of Lauterbach debugger. It is a hardware based modular debugger that supports many processors. It is considered to be high-end debugger product for Embedded Linux debugging and is quite expensive. The company serves a niche-market of in-circuit emulators, especially on systems using JTAG, which it sells under the brand name TRACE32.
I was expecting demonstration that goes well because I had seen such demo years ago. The feature set on the sofware was large. The software on demo was running on Windows, but they also have Linux software. The demonatration used Pandaboard running Linux. The debugger had both Ethernet and USB connection options to PC.
But the whole thing felt like somewhat old fashioned: software UI like things 10-15 years back and hardware 20 years back in time. The modular debugger consisted of several boxes wired together. Does not feel like reliable.
If everything would work well, those things would not be so bad on professional tool. But the thing seemed to be quite unreliable. There were too many problems with dev board to debugger issues (needed device power downs to solve) and also Windows software crashing. I was expecting more reliable operation. Has the product quality gone down over years or some hardware problem in this demo?
What are the other alternatives for Embedded Linux debugging worth to check?
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2 Comments
Hugo Reyes says:
“software UI like things 10-15 years back and hardware 20 years back in time” this debugging tool set is intended for embedded targets, so efficiency is what matters not a beautiful GUI. “It is considered to be high-end debugger” this is true, for debugging embedded targets there is no more powerful debugger available. Signum could be an option but not that complete “Does not feel like reliable” have you used other debuggers out there for debugging PowerPC or ARM processors for example?. “Has the product quality gone down over years or some hardware problem in this demo” I work with this tools on a daily basis and can tell you there is no more reliable debugger out there, but the tool is very advanced and not easy to use so this demo very probably went wrong. The tool is a product and as such it needs maintenance, it is not bug free but nonetheless it is still the most powerful HW/SW debugging tool set available.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Thank you for your feedback.
Thank you for your feedback.
I quess that there is possibility the demo could have went somewhat wrong.
I have had some hands-on testing on LauterBach (hour or two with instructor) many many years ago
on some different processor system and other OS, and at that time things worked much better
than in that new demo.
I have use GDB (both local and remote) to debug software running on PowerPC and ARM processors.
And used some other hardware/software debuggers for certain processors over years…