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An Energy-interference-free Hardware-Software Debugger for Intermittent Energy-harvesting Systems

Published:25 March 2016Publication History
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Abstract

Energy-autonomous computing devices have the potential to extend the reach of computing to a scale beyond either wired or battery-powered systems. However, these devices pose a unique set of challenges to application developers who lack both hardware and software support tools. Energy harvesting devices experience power intermittence which causes the system to reset and power-cycle unpredictably, tens to hundreds of times per second. This can result in code execution errors that are not possible in continuously-powered systems and cannot be diagnosed with conventional debugging tools such as JTAG and/or oscilloscopes. We propose the Energy-interference-free Debugger, a hardware and software platform for monitoring and debugging intermittent systems without adversely effecting their energy state. The Energy-interference-free Debugger re-creates a familiar debugging environment for intermittent software and augments it with debugging primitives for effective diagnosis of intermittence bugs. Our evaluation of the Energy-interference-free Debugger quantifies its energy-interference-freedom and shows its value in a set of debugging tasks in complex test programs and several real applications, including RFID code and a machine-learning-based activity recognition system.

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          • Published in

            cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
            ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 51, Issue 4
            ASPLOS '16
            April 2016
            774 pages
            ISSN:0362-1340
            EISSN:1558-1160
            DOI:10.1145/2954679
            • Editor:
            • Andy Gill
            Issue’s Table of Contents
            • cover image ACM Conferences
              ASPLOS '16: Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems
              March 2016
              824 pages
              ISBN:9781450340915
              DOI:10.1145/2872362
              • General Chair:
              • Tom Conte,
              • Program Chair:
              • Yuanyuan Zhou

            Copyright © 2016 ACM

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            New York, NY, United States

            Publication History

            • Published: 25 March 2016

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