The world of embedded systems evolves, with devices growing ever more sophisticated and software-centric. In this new landscape, with highly interconnected environments that defy traditional testing and debugging approaches, a reactive, fire-fighting mentality is no longer sufficient. Developers need a proactive strategy to gain continuous visibility into system behaviour—a strategy known as observability-driven development (ODD).

FreeRTOS 11 introduced symmetric multi-processing (SMP) support in the mainline kernel, meaning a single FreeRTOS kernel is managing multiple processor cores. This allows for high performance but also makes the runtime system more complex, meaning higher risk of issues and more difficult debugging. System tracing with Percepio Tracealyzer can offer an effective remedy by providing insight into the system execution.