A practical approach to developing real-time Ada programs for embedded systems

An important aspect of the development of real-time Ada programs is the interaction of the program with the real-target architecture. Many development systems run out of support once the object code has been generated. Developers are often left to find their own way when it comes to getting programs to work on the real-time embedded system. This paper describes a practical approach to developing real-time systems based on online support for building, loading and debugging Ada programs on real targets. The author has been involved in the development of a toolset which enables developers to load programs into the non-homogeneous target memories, and then run them at full speed under interactive control. Breakpoints, monitoring, profiling, and the display and modification of variables may all be achieved using symbolic references. The present toolset design has been extended to a full multiprocessor implementation which is currently under development.