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Real-time systems development is a complex process. Due to this fact, the ability to trace the different system events becomes essential in order to verify the correct system behavior and implementation. The POSIX 1003.1q tracing standard provides an interface to handle event data. However, it does not fit well with multilevel software tracing, in which it is necessary to extract events information from different levels, and route it to different tracing tools that are suitable for representing the semantic of the levels.

This paper presents an implementation of a multilevel tracing mechanism over the Real Time Application Interface (RTAI). The goal of this work is to facilitate the validation and verification process of RTAI-based real-time software systems developed with a component based graphical modeling CASE tool, named EDROOM. The EDROOM services library provides tracing information letting the designer to analyze the behavior of the components during the system execution, with the advantage of using a tracing tool with the same graphical state-charts notation defined by the EDROOM formalism.

The solution also supports the tracing of the application events, which will belong to different upper levels, that are specific of each software system. The code generated by EDROOM is adapted to be executed as a kernel module over RTAI, and all the trace information is sent through a FIFO using the proper RTAI interface. A Linux user task is in charge of receiving the information, redistributing it to different pipes or files that feed different trace tools assigned to each level. An example of use of the whole multilevel tracing mechanism is also showed.