When starting oroGen-generated deployments, the Orocos.run command gives you some ways to use common debugging tools like gdb or valgrind to debug your components.

GDB

Orocos.run can be told to start the processes / deployments under gdb using the :gdb option

Orocos.run 'my_project::Task' => 'task', :gdb => true do
...
end

This starts the process using the gdb server. Once the process is started, Orocos.run warns you that

Orocos[WARN]: process task has been started under gdbserver, port=30001. The components will not be functional until you attach a GDB to the started server
Process /media/Data/dev/rock/master-full/install/bin/orogen_default_camera_firewire__CameraTask created; pid = 29756

You have then to attach a gdb client to it with

gdb /media/Data/dev/rock/master-full/install/bin/orogen_default_camera_firewire__CameraTask
> target remote localhost:30001

Note that if you need to start some components under gdb and some not, list the components / deployments you want to start under gdb instead of ‘true’

Orocos.run 'my_project::Task' => 'task', 'my_deployment', :gdb => ['task', 'my_deployment'] do
...
end

Valgrind

With the same general interface, you can start the components on valgrind

Orocos.run 'my_project::Task' => 'task', :valgrind => true do
...
end

or, if you want to select specific processes:

Orocos.run 'my_project::Task' => 'task', 'my_deployment',
 :valgrind => ['task', 'my_deployment'] do
...
end

In order to not get spammed by the valgrind output, you definitely should setup the output redirection to file:

Orocos.run 'my_project::Task' => 'task', 'my_deployment',
 :output => '%m-%p.log', :valgrind => ['task', 'my_deployment'] do
...
end

in which case the valgrind output is redirected to a separate process logfile, which is the process’ log file name with .valgrind appended (in the example above, task-PID.log.valgrind and my_deployment-PID.log.valgrind, where PID is the process ID of the started deployment)

It is also possible to pass options to valgrind:

Orocos.run 'my_project::Task' => 'task', 'my_deployment',
 :valgrind: true, :valgrind_options: ['--undef-value-errors=no'] do
...
end

Ignore RTT Exception Handling

RTT catches by default all exeption from the tasks. This is because RTT tries to be as safe as possible. A somehow crashed task should never influence the execution of other components within the same deployment. However, for debugging purposes, it is convenient to let the exceptions be unhandled and cause a process abort. This makes the debugging with gdb easier. To activate this debugging behaviour set the environment variable RTT_IGNORE_EXCEPTION to 1.

    RTT_IGNORE_EXCEPTION=1 ruby any_script.rb