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Your real-time system consists of the VxWorks operating system, your real-time application, and the target hardware. The system involves complex interactions among tasks, interrupts, and VxWorks system objects (including message queues and semaphores). These interactions must occur within certain time constraints, often characterized by resolutions of microseconds or finer.
While common tools for debugging and benchmarking real-time systems, such as source-level debuggers and profilers, can provide much useful information about a system, they provide only a static picture of a dynamic situation. WindView acts as a logic analyzer for real-time software. It allows you to study the dynamic interactions of all the elements of your complex system.
WindView displays the dynamic information about your real-time system in a view graph window, shown in Figure 1-1. The view graph provides manageable access to a wealth of information about the real-time system. With this window, you can scroll the information forward and backward in time and zoom in and out to different time scales. You can tailor the display to contain only the tasks and events you need to study.
WindView provides tools to collect exactly the data you need. You can specify several levels of detail. You can use the triggering facility to start and stop data collection so that data is collected from a precise interval under precise conditions. You can manage data upload to the host to optimize your system resources. You can create your own application-specific events to provide precise information on a unique condition. You can use pre-packaged analysis tools to relate calculated information to specific system events.
Because it provides a view into the complex activities of a real-time system, WindView allows you to do the following:
Tornado 2.2 includes WindView for your host simulator. When you start Tornado, you can immediately run VxWorks on your integrated simulator and use WindView to examine events generated by various built-in shell commands.
The integrated version of WindView is automatically configured for your integrated simulator; no preparation is required. Its only limitation is that it does not support non-simulator targets. This means that you only upload data from a simulator and that there is no network support; thus the TCP/IP upload path is not available.
The WindView documentation consists of the WindView Release Notes, the WindView User's Guide (this document), the WindView User's Reference, and the WindView online help. Each component of the documentation is designed to serve a specific purpose, and will serve you best if you take that purpose into account.
This user's guide is an introduction to using the WindView tool. It provides information on installing WindView, using the default configuration, and customizing the tool to solve specific types of problems. The appendices are sources of detailed information and context. They discuss the WindView architecture and application programming interfaces (APIs). Detailed reference material on the VxWorks routines that are specific to WindView is found in the online help.
The chapters provide the following types of information about WindView:
Figure 1-2 diagrams the purposes of these chapters.
The online help includes context sensitive help for the GUI. It also includes a detailed table of contents and index with an extensive list of "How Do I...?" questions. One of these methods can take you directly to the information you need to complete a specific task. In many cases, the short answers in the online help contain links to the online version of the WindView User's Guide to provide in-depth information not contained in the help references. Access to the complete text of the User's Guide is also provided through the Contents tab.
When WindView is installed, the entry WindView Help appears in the main Help menu. When you point to this entry, the following commands appear in a submenu: Help Topics, Search for Help on, and Legend. The first two commands are typical Windows help commands which take you to the WindView help window.
This command displays a window that summarizes the meaning of every WindView event icon and stipple, and also provides links to the full description of each event in the online event dictionary. See The Legend Window for more discussion of this window.
