HOWTO: RT latency debugging

Latency

When a real-time system is said to have latencies or that it has a latency that needs to be debugged, the term latency means “a situation in which a task or an operation took too long to finish”. In a real-time context, the time that it takes a system to perform a particular task (i.e. the latency of the task) is important as each task must be able to finish before its specified deadline.

Techniques

• General steps for latency debugging
• Latency detection tools
• Debugging SMI latencies