Creating Chaos and Hard Faults

The best way to understand why the processor is sending you love letters (exceptions) is to see what they look like when you aren’t also frantically trying to fix your code. This talk goes over the code necessary to cause (and debug) divide by zero, bus errors, stack overflows, and buffer overflows.

For each one, Elecia looks at the information the Cortex-M processor provides and how to use that to determine the cause of the fault. She describes how to use the information in a hard fault handler to create small core dumps to be stored after a system reboot.

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Buried Treasure and Map Files

Often overlooked, the map file can provide a wealth of information to the intrepid developer. Map files can help:

• optimizing for RAM usage and/or code space
• updating firmware (with or without a bootloader)
• debugging difficult crash bugs
• statistical profiling

With so much information, how can you use it? Where do you look? How do you turn the wall of text and numbers into a true map of the code?

Elecia will demonstrate how to use map files. She will focus on an ARM Cortex-M but it will be relevant to other processors.

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Live Q&A - Buried Treasure and Map Files

Live Q&A with Elecia White for the talk titled Buried Treasure and Map Files

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