Today, Lauterbach, the world’s leading debug tool supplier, is pleased to announce debug and trace support for Elektrobit’s automotive virtualization solution, the EB corbos Hypervisor, and Kernkonzept’s L4Re System.
Elektrobit and Kernkonzept built the EB corbos Hypervisor on Kernkonzept’s capability-based L4Re operating-system framework, serving the safety and security needs of high-performance platforms optimized for the automotive market.
The L4Re System is not limited to the automotive market. It also supports industrial applications in domains such as secure networking, high-assurance cloud computing, industrial IoT, and smart-home appliances, helping customers to build flexible systems primarily focusing on security, safety, and real-time. As a type-1 virtualization solution, it exploits hardware-virtualization support inherent to modern core architectures such as Arm and x86. Its central component, the L4Re Microkernel, ensures maximum isolation among virtual machines (VMs) and native microkernel applications.
This isolation is a prerequisite for the seamless consolidation of functions from distributed electrical control units (ECUs) into high-performance computers (HPCs) that are required when new electrical infrastructures are introduced in vehicles. Hence the EB corbos Hypervisor enables efficient partitioning of HPCs for fast booting, safe, and secure execution of dozens of applications and VMs side by side on a single many-core processor.
Lauterbach’s TRACE32’s Awareness for EB corbos Hypervisor and the L4Re System allows the debugging of VMs and native hypervisor applications placed across a many-core system. The Awareness grants transparent access to the guest operating system running inside a VM as well as to hypervisor applications, drivers, and the L4Re Microkernel itself.
The benefit of an off-chip debug solution is that it allows concurrent access to the hardware and periphery, the microkernel, hypervisor applications, and VMs whilst being aware of all memory management unit (MMU) and protection mechanisms of the hardware.
The Awareness detects and gathers the states of VMs and native applications, eases debugging by automatically displaying the correct source code and variables, and also offers process- and VM-sensitive breakpoints and extended features such as extracting high-level information from the VMs, like the Linux kernel log.
Combined with a trace functionality like the Arm Embedded Trace Macrocell (ETM), development time can be significantly reduced with trace-based debugging. Optimizations based on run-time analysis and quality checks like code coverage are possible as well. A demonstration running on the NXP S32G is available. The tool support from Lauterbach is also available for Renesas R-Car platform.
“Hypervisors enable highly integrated embedded systems but also add another level of complexity. We are proud to announce support for the EB corbos Hypervisor, and to extend the L4Re ecosystem. TRACE32 demonstrates, again, that it is a tool for every stage of a product lifecycle, giving embedded developers complete visibility of their entire design,” says Norbert Weiss, Managing Director of Lauterbach.
“TRACE32 is an essential tool for our customers developing L4Re-based systems for their complex and connected products. We are pleased about the trace and debug support for the EB corbos Hypervisor we built with our partner Elektrobit,” says Michael Hohmuth, CEO, Kernkonzept GmbH.
“The TRACE32 support in the EB corbos Hypervisor is an important milestone on the way to facilitate the use of virtualization in the automotive market. The system analysis and provision of information during the development has a considerable influence on the success of the development of complex systems and at the same time shortened development cycles,” says Martin Schleicher, Executive Vice President Business Management of Elektrobit.
The Awareness itself is available free of charge to Lauterbach customers.
About Elektrobit (EB)
Elektrobit (EB) is an award-winning and visionary global supplier of embedded and connected software products and services for the automotive industry. A leader in automotive software with over 30 years serving the industry, EB’s software powers over one billion devices in more than 100 million vehicles and offers flexible, innovative solutions for car infrastructure software, connectivity & security, automated driving and related tools, and user experience. EB is a wholly owned subsidiary of Continental.