4. Debugging and Simulating Applications
You’ve compiled and run your application, but the development process doesn’t end there. If runtime errors crop up, you need a way to step through the executable and determine which lines of code produced the errors. The SDK provides two debuggers for this purpose: ppu-gdb and spu-gdb, and both closely resemble GNU’s gdb debugger.
Even if the application runs without errors, it might not meet performance requirements. In this case, you need to locate problems like pipeline stalls, branch miss percentages, and direct memory access (DMA) bus overload. No debugger can give you these statistics, but IBM’s Full-System Simulator for the Cell processor, called SystemSim, provides all this information and more. ...
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