[Tinyos-help] procps for TinyOS?

[Angela Perez]

Hi Urs, Phil, Marco,
Thanks for the advice. Yes profiling is a better explanation of what I was
trying to do. But ideally I would have liked to see how much overhead (if
any) TOS adds to the execution of a simple program (e.g. Blink). For
instance when a program compiles, I get X bytes in RAM, Y bytes in ROM - it
would be nice to know how many of these bytes are taken up by TOS and how
many by my functions/commands/tasks - understandably a difficult or maybe
impossible task for the compiler since it creates one .c file and then one
.exe/.ihex file, so I was probably thinking wishfully....
Or how many instructions a function takes, how many cpu cycles per
instructions, etc.
Thanks about the avrora ref, I will look into it.
I know about TOSSIM and Power-TOSSIM (in T1), so I'll see if I can get some
of the info I need from the simulator.
Thanks again
A-

On Dec 5, 2007 6:40 AM, Urs Hunkeler <uhu at gmx.ch> wrote:

> Hi Angela,
>
> As Philip pointed out, TinyOS doesn't know about processes or
> kernel-mode operation in the traditional sense. It sounds as if you
> wanted to do profiling, like how much time is spent to perform a given
> operation and how much of this time is taken by core TinyOS functions,
> etc.
>
> Including support for profiling measurements would take a significant
> part of the processing power on a typical TinyOS-capable device, so
> nobody really wants to include such things directly in TinyOS and
> measure it in hardware. The exception is if you just need to know the
> characteristics of a very particular operation. In this case you could
> toggle a pin on the micro-controller just before starting the operation,
> and then toggle the pin again when the operation finishes. Then you
> could measure the timing of the operation with an oscilloscope.
>
> TinyOS 1.x has a means of simulating power consumption. I don't know how
> they do it, but maybe their mechanisms could be used to estimate
> time-based profiling information as well.
>
> A post on a different thread recently mentioned the Avrora project. It
> looks like it is a hardware simulator and the porject web-page mentions
> profiling. http://compilers.cs.ucla.edu/avrora/
>
> If you think that the behavior of your program will change over time
> (for instance depending on the network configuration), once you know the
> cost of operations (for instance estimated with the TinyOS 1.x power
> consumption simulation or the Avrora project) you could get runtime
> estimates of the distribution of processing power by counting the number
> of executions of key operations. This would be much cheaper (in terms of
> processing overhead) than actually measure execution times.
>
> Cheers,
> Urs
>
>
> Angela Perez schrieb:
> > HI Guys,
> >
> > Just wondering if anybody knows any TOS tools that would show
> information
> > about processes running inside a mote (something like top, vmstat,
> > etc...although over-simplified)
> > Eg. would be useful to know how much cpu/memory in user mode and how
> much is
> > taken by TOS kernel (timers, scheduler, etc).
> > Even something low-level like instructions per second would be useful I
> > think....Maybe there is a way to get this info , if anybody knows any
> > process info tricks, please share! :-)
> >
> > Thanks
> > Angela.
>
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