Embedded Systems Architecture

Running the application

Once the image is built, we can run it on a real target or using qemu-system-arm, as explained in Chapter 2, Work Environment and Workflow Optimization. Since the application will produce no output while running on the emulator, to investigate more on the actual behavior of the software it is required to attach a debugger to it. When running the emulator, qemu-system-arm must be invoked with the -S option, meaning stop, so that it will not start the execution until the debugger is connected. Since the CFLAGS variable in the previous step contains the -g option, all the symbol names will be kept in the .elf so that the debugger can follow the execution through the code line by line, placing breakpoints and checking ...