Abstract

When developing applications under embedded Linux, there is a range of software tools to assist the development process. However, they are so tightly integrated that it is not only difficult to integrate into IDE but hard to add an additional tool. They are communicating with each other through their own protocols so that there is much communication overhead between host and target… machine. In this paper, we propose loosely coupled tool integration architecture based on lightweight RPC mechanism. The proposed architecture is mainly composed of two agents running on host and target side respectively. To integrate various tools in a seamless way, we suggest well-defined host-to-target protocol and inter-tool protocol. Host agent mediates request from several host tools and interacts with the target agent. The host agent set out a set of common APIs needed for host-resident tool integration. The target agent, the counterpart of the host agent, is a kind of debug demon which serves request from the host agent. As designed for embedded software development, the size of target side agent is about 100KB and consumes less than 5% of CPU time. With the proposed architecture, we easily integrate various host tools using open APIs with low overhead target agent.

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