Hands-On RTOS with Microcontrollers

RTOS-aware debugging

With traditional debugging setups used for bare-metal (for example, no OS) coding, there was only one stack to observe. Since the programming model was a single super loop with some interrupts, this wasn't much of a problem. At any point in time, the state of the system could be discerned by the following:

• Knowing which function the program counter (PC) was in
• Knowing which interrupts were active 
• Looking at the value of key global variables
• Observing/unwinding the stack

With an RTOS-based system, the basic approach is very similar but the programming model is extended to include multiple tasks running in parallel. Remember, each task is effectively an isolated infinite loop. Since each task has its own stack and can ...