Published: 2013-11-13
ISBN: 978-91-7519-451-6
ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)
Virtual platforms are gaining significant importance in early design tests of embedded software as it helps to redesign or optimize the system well advance in time and keeps flaws minimal in the production stage. As embedded system’s size gets smaller; expensive resources like memory are limited. Hence memory needs to be managed efficiently and optimally. Memory leak is a serious issue that leads to wastage of expensive memory.We propose a novel approach to detect memory leaks in early design stages of soft real-time systems with no garbage collection. Our approach utilizes a virtual platform modeled in SystemC at an abstract level using Transaction Level Modeling. The software under test is run on top of this model. Potential memory leaks in the software are detected by applying a novel hybrid method combining both static and dynamic approaches. In early design stages where a real execution environment and complete executable software are unavailable; a simulation environment and a virtual platform are necessary. Virtual platforms provide flexibility to change the target architecture to be tested. Our proposed approach runs on the virtual platform we implement. This makes our approach faster and provides early results.
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