Debugging protocol for remote cross development environment

To develop the applications for Internet appliances, embedded software development tools need various host tools such as cross compilers and binary utilities as well as a remote debugger, an interactive shell, and real time resource monitors. The heavy host-target communication overhead and inconsistency caused by various host tools make target monitor programs more complex. The authors propose a debugging protocol for these tools that supports several host-resident tools under the existence of RTOS. To abstract the details of the target systems, we have developed a target agent running as a task on the RTOS. The target agent is the counterpart of the host agent that supports host tools through communication over UDP/IP. The proposed architecture is implemented and tested on Esto (Embedded Systems Toolset), a development tool for Internet based embedded applications.