Category: Software Debug and Trace

Don't miss it! ASSET's Alan Sguigna (that's me), in collaboration with the UEFI Forum, will be presenting and demonstrating SourcePoint using the Intel Architectural Event Trace (AET) feature, which offers an unparalleled level of insight into x86 event generation and code execution.
Wow! It has been a while. I wrote Episode 2 of my open-source explorations into the AAEON Intel Apollo Lake-based Up Squared board back on June 7th. In that episode, I gave directions on how to build the UEFI debug image for the board, complete with source/symbols for consumption by JTAG debuggers like SourcePoint. In this episode, I show source-level debug with SourcePoint, and take advantage of Intel Processor Trace on the board.
In Part 3 of this series, we did a code review of โ€œltloopโ€, a utility firmware application that uses the BMC to do out-of-band stress tests of PCI Express ports. In this article, we begin to examine a more general-purpose application that uses JTAG to extract register, memory and IO contents of the target. This On-Target Diagnostic (OTD), called โ€œlibtestโ€, is used by ASSET to test the functionality of run-control on new targets.
In the last article on this topic, we did a dive into the main routine of the lt_loop JTAG-based On-Target Diagnostic, seeing the overall flow of the program. In this article, weโ€™ll look at the routine that does the heavy lifting for retraining the PCI Express link and checking for errors.
In my previousย blog, I did a walkthrough of the source code for main() within the ltloop JTAG-based on-target diagnostic. This article covers main() in more detail, and provides insight into some of the operations of the utility functions and data structures.
In my UEFI Forum webinar, I demonstrated a utility function for stressing PCI Express ports at-scale using JTAG. Letโ€™s walk through the source code and see how it works under the hood.
In my webinar with the UEFI Forum, I demonstrated some of the utility of using JTAG functionality within BMCs to perform out-of-band debug. This is a tutorial on the coding practices to use the SED API.
This past week, I did a webinar in collaboration with the UEFI Forum on JTAG-based UEFI Debug and Trace. This reviewed some of the often-used tools for low-level triage of difficult-to-diagnose, intermittent bugs. Near the end, I demonstrated the usage of technology running directly down on a BMC to perform low-level functions not achievable with firmware or OS-based applications.
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