Analyzing and understanding the behavior of real-time embedded systems is a complex task. Often, developers resort to ad-hoc methods in order to understand the behavior of their systems and isolate bugs. Answering this need, some commercial RTOS vendors have made available different types of tools to understand their product's behavior. The effectiveness of such tools vary, but they are usually quite expensive, which proves to be a barrier to entry when wanting to design any system using an RTOS.

The RTAI extensions to the Linux Trace Toolkit presented here take these barriers away and provide developers with an open-source set of tools to analyze and understand the behavior of any RTAI-based real-time system. This analysis involves presenting RTAI's behavior in a control-graph form and presenting statistics regarding the overall system behavior including all the real-time tasks that ran. Furthermore, tracing such a system involves an overhead of, at most, 1 micro-second per event, which is very acceptable behavior for most real-time systems.

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