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Green Hills: Two Products, Two Firsts


Company releases WiFi reference kit, universal trace probe adapter

By Edward J. Correia
March 15, 2005 — 
A pair of new product releases from Green Hills also represent two company firsts.

The company on March 7 began shipping a version of its SuperTrace probe that for the first time works with target designs that do not have a trace port, the specialized connector found on some hardware that allows developers to peer inside a processor’s inner workings for application debugging.

Also on that date the company unveiled the WiFi Reference Design, an ARM-based development kit that it says is ready to run either its Integrity RTOS or its kernel, Velosity, for the creation of 802.11 a/b/g devices for all manner of handheld applications, including inventory tracking, telephony, and medical and transportation equipment. The company in July will add security stacks to its Wireless Ethernet driver and IPv4 and v6 stacks that will permit the creation of stationary wireless devices, such as access points.

David Barnett, Green Hills’ director of product marketing, said the company is providing the kits as a convenience, and is not getting into the hardware business. “With something like WiFi, where there are a lot of hardware dependencies, people want something that works out of the box. The reference design will allow them to start writing and adding applications right away.” The boards will be manufactured by either Cogent or Embedded Planet; deals were still pending at press time. Green Hills will sell the kit for US$1,500 plus software.

Without a Trace
Barnett said that with the addition of the non-trace processor support, initially for PowerPC processors only, the $9,990 SuperTrace probe will be useful to a greater number of developers than the SuperTrace alone. “[Previously], the probe was great for people with a processor with a trace port but not useful otherwise. This lets people without a trace port take advantage of trace data collection of the Probe.”

Non-trace support is implemented by means of a $2,900 adapter that connects between the processor and its bus, permitting signals to be intercepted and analyzed by a developer’s own tools, or by Green Hills’ $4,900 TimeMachine debugger. “An extension to our linker analyzes binary code and adds instrumented code—a type of logging command—after each block. It monitors addresses that are being sent to by instructions.”

TimeMachine presents a visual display of an application’s execution history. “It lets you debug step by step backwards from bugs to find the cause,” Barnett said, adding that developers already familiar with TimeMachine will have an easy time implementing instrumentation. “It’s a flag you set when you link your application. There’s no other change.”

Barnett claimed that with its 1GB of internal memory and ability to work on binaries, the SuperTrace probe is unlike most competitors, which instrument source code and buffer into target memory. “So you’re doing a post-mortem on an execution—you have to recompile. Since we instrument the binary, you don’t have to recompile, and you can trace even if you no longer have access to the source.”


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