Chapter 13. Development Tools

In this chapter

• GNU Debugger (GDB) page 310

• Data Display Debugger page 317

• cbrowser/cscope page 319

• Tracing and Profiling Tools page 321

• Binary Utilities page 340

• Miscellaneous Binary Utilities page 346

• Chapter Summary page 349

A typical embedded Linux distribution includes many useful tools. Some are complex and require a great deal of proficiency to master. Others are simple and have been all but ignored by developers of embedded systems. Some tools might require customization for a particular environment. Many will run "right out of the box" and provide the developer with useful information without much effort. This chapter presents a cross-section of the most important (and frequently neglected) tools available to the embedded Linux engineer.

It is impossible to provide complete details on the tools and utilities presented in this chapter. That would take an entire book by itself! Rather than provide a complete reference, our goal is to provide an introduction on the basic usage of each one. You are encouraged to pursue additional study on these and other important development tools. The man page (or other documentation) for each tool is a great place to start.

The GNU Debugger (GDB) is introduced first, followed by a brief look at the Data Display Debugger, a graphical front end for GDB. Next we introduce a series of utilities designed to give the developer a look at the behavior of programs and the system as a whole. These include strace, ltrace, top, and ps, often overlooked by inexperienced Linux developers. We then present some crash dump and memory-analysis tools. The chapter concludes by introducing some of the more useful binary utilities.