A real-time monitor for a distributed real-time operating system

Monitoring and debugging for a distributed real-time system is a complicated problem due to the lack of a set of advanced tools and adequate operating system capability. Software tools can cover the wide range of the software development life cycle from the requirement analysis phase to debugging and maintenance phases. However, many of these modern tools are not effective for building or analyzing complex real-time systems. Real-time software tools and effective kernel support are essential to reduce the complexity of real-time software. In this paper, we first address the issues in real-time monitoring and debugging, such as capturing the timing error, the monitor's invasive nature and visualization of system behavior. We then describe the architecture of the ART Real-Time Monitor which is being built for a distributed real-time OS, called ARTS. The built-in monitoring/debugging kernel primitives are also mentioned.