Runtime Tracing of Flight Software

Abstract

In aerospace and aeronautics, technology has advanced like having in flight entertainment system, internet, autonomous flight systems, satellites used for navigation, weather, earth observation. All these innovations and functionalities are controlled and monitored by a central computing device called On-Board Computer in aerospace. German aerospace center developed an execution platform called Tasking Framework. The Tasking Framework is a middleware between the OS and the application. The multithreaded applications are difficult to monitor compared to sequential code and it is important to observe the temporal behavior of the application at low level to determine the bottlenecks. To record the low-level information a technique called tracing is used in this thesis work. The tracing functionality is integrated to the tasking framework in order to record the low-level events of the application and perform offline trace analysis to optimize the application’s performance.