Bryan Hinton: Debugging Multithreaded / Multiprocess Applications on the DE0-Nano-SoC with ARM DS-5

Monday, August 15, 2016

Debugging Multithreaded / Multiprocess Applications on the DE0-Nano-SoC with ARM DS-5

ARM DS-5 is an ideal platform for debugging multithreaded, multiprocess applications on ARM Powered® development boards that run the GNU/Linux operating system. The DE0-Nano-SoC is an ideal reference platform for developing multithreaded, multiprocess applications in Linux user space. Yocto provides an easy to use platform for building a bootable image and ARM® DS-5 easily integrates with the board for efficient debugging. Altera packages a version of ARM DS-5 for the DE0-Nano-SoC.

The following requirements were in place for this project.

Use course-grained locking strategy. Only lock data.
Minimize critical sections.
Fork five processes, all of which are attached to the controlling terminal.
Create three threads in one of the five processes.
Two of the threads will simulate packet processing.
One of the threads will generate packets in a buffer.
Properly utilize synchronization primitives and mutex locks.
Maximize concurrency.
Minimize latency.
Ensure order of context switching is always random upon execution - i.e. don't control the scheduler.
Utilize ARM DS-5 for building and debugging the application on the attached de0-Nano-SoC FPGA.
Use autotools for building a shared library and link against the library with a driver program in DS-5.
Compile the shared library and driver program using the Linaro GCC ARM-Linux-GNUEABI Hard Float toolchain version 4.8 that is included in the Altera DS-5 download.
Compile the shared library and test program using the Linaro GCC ARM-Linux-GNUEABI Hard Float toolchain version 5.3 (latest stable from Linaro as of 08/15/16).
Debug the multiprocess, multithreaded application using both toolchains from DS-5.
Ensure that all possible errors from calls to pthread functions and other libc functions are properly handled.