Runtime Performance Evaluation of a Non-Preemptive Cooperative Multitasking Framework Through Tracing

Abstract

Software systems for space applications can grow quite complex, making the development of them a time-consuming process. To aid in the development of space application, the Tasking Framework was created to establish a modeling system tailored to the data processing needs of space applications. The Tasking Framework is a cooperative, non-pre-emptive framework and execution platform capable of multi-tasking. The complexity of space applications makes debugging them the traditional way difficult. Tracing is a way to record the behaviour of a system during runtime. These recordings, called traces, can then be analysed to find bugs and extrapolate future system behaviour. This work seeks to implement tracing within Tasking Framework in a way so that it can be used for debugging and further analysis of systems developed with Tasking Framework, while working off of pre-existing structures. Furthermore, the traces are then graphically represented to facilitate debugging. Additionally, this work presents different ways to use traces to predict and draw conclusions about future system behaviour and how they can be applied to the generated traces, such as arrival curves, minimal distance functions and execution time analyses.