Sbdoped

Sbdoped is a diagnostic framework used primarily in embedded systems to assess boot performance and early-stage software behavior. The name is an acronym for “Software Boot Diagnostic Operation and Performance Evaluation Dashboard.” It was first introduced in 2015 by a consortium of semiconductor manufacturers and open‑source contributors led by the Embedded Systems Community Consortium. The project aimed to provide a unified, extendable interface for developers to capture boot metrics across diverse hardware platforms, from microcontrollers to application processors.

The core of Sbdoped is a lightweight kernel module that intercepts system calls and hardware events during the boot sequence. Collected data—including timestamps, interrupt statistics, and memory usage—is streamed to a user‑space listener written in C++. The listener aggregates this information into a human‑readable report and exposes a RESTful API for integration with continuous‑integration pipelines. Because the framework is modular, vendors can ship custom plug‑ins to track vendor‑specific events or sensors.

Sbdoped supports a range of operating systems, most notably Linux, Zephyr, and FreeRTOS. Its open‑source license (MIT) has encouraged adoption in both commercial products and academic research. Several university laboratories have used it to benchmark power‑gating strategies and to validate real‑time operating system schedulers. Some industry partners have extended Sbdoped with security‑related probes to detect unauthorized code injection during the boot process.

Ongoing development focuses on expanding hardware abstraction layers to cover newer SoC architectures and on improving the data‑visualization component. By providing a common language for boot‑time diagnostics, Sbdoped has become a standard tool in many embedded development workflows.