• Profiling Firmware on Cortex-M

    by François Baldassari

    In this post, we explore different techniques that can be used to profile firmware applications running on ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers. To profile our Mandelbrot application on STM32, we start with a naive debugger-based sampling method, and eventually discover ITM, DWT cycle counters, and more!

  • What we've been reading in May (2020)

    by François Baldassari

    Here are the articles, videos, and tools that we’ve been excited about this May.

  • Better Firmware with LLVM/Clang

    by Chris Coleman

    In this article, I hope I can convince you that adding a Clang build target to your project can be a relatively simple and useful endeavor. We will cover how to take advantage of some of the rich features shipped with the toolchain and identify some memory leaks and mutex deadlocks in an example project at compile time! We will also walk through a step-by-step example of updating a GCC based ARM Cortex-M project to cross-compile with LLVM/Clang.

  • Embedded C/C++ Unit Testing with Mocks

    by Tyler Hoffman

    In this article, we do a deep-dive into unit testing with mocks. We’ll go over where they fit into your unit testing infrastructure, how to write them in C/C++, and finally run through some real-world examples. At the end, we’ll briefly talk about integration tests.

  • What we've been reading in April (2020)

    by Tyler Hoffman

    Here are the articles, videos, and tools that we’ve been excited about this April.

  • Hunting Bugs with Git Bisect

    by Shiva Rajagopal

    This article is a personal story of a time I had to run a bisect on a repository, and the thoughts that went through my mind as it happened. I touch on how to find a bug using git’s bisect feature and go over some easy strategies to narrow your search space as much as possible. Lastly, I detail some ways of speeding up that search through git bisect’s automation options.

  • gdbundle - GDB and LLDB's Missing Plugin Manager

    by Tyler Hoffman

    GDB and LLDB desperately need a way for developers to share scripts, user-interface improvements, and utilities with their peers. This would enable building upon existing work and debugging techniques, progressing the entire community and preventing developers from reinventing the wheel. GDB and LLDB need a plugin manager, and I’d like to introduce to you gdbundle.

  • GNU Binutils: the ELF Swiss Army Knife

    by Chris Coleman

    In this article, we will explore some of my favorite binary introspection tools, such as GNU Binutils. The material is geared toward the embedded software crowd that typically writes C and C++, but many of the ideas, tools, and lessons learned can be applied to a variety of low-level software. We will walk through practical examples of how the tools can be leveraged to aid in the development process irrespective of the compiler you are using (e.g. GCC, Clang, IAR, ARMCC, etc).