Symbol Table Manipulation in TinyOS
I realized one of the hacks we had used in our testbed is of use to other researchers as well. When running an experiment using MEMSIC Motes, it is possible that you need a large number of images which only differ in some variable values. For example, only the variable indicating start time for each of them is different.
Instead of changing the variable and recompiling, you can do the following. Declare your desired variable(s) as
extern const uint8_t myVar;
After compiling the main image, take a look at your symbol table by typing
tos-set-symbols --read /path/to/main.exe
This will show a table like following:
AMQueueImplP__0__current : 01 [.] (1) AMQueueImplP__1__current : 01 [.] (1) ActiveMessageAddressC__addr : 01 00 [..] (1) ArbiterP__0__resId : 01 [.] (1) CC1000RssiP__currentOp : 04 [.] (4) CC1000SendReceiveP__BIT_CORRECTION : 1b 1c 1e 20 22 24 26 28 [... "$&(] CC1000SendReceiveP__rxBufPtr : 5c 02 [\.] (604) CC1000SquelchP__clearThreshold : 20 01 [ .] (288) MyModule__myVar : 00 00 [..] (500) SerialDispatcherP__0__messagePtrs : fb 02 2a 03 [..*.] (53084923) SerialDispatcherP__0__receiveBuffer : fb 02 [..] (763) SerialDispatcherP__0__recvType : ff [.] (255) TOS_NODE_ID : 01 00 [..] (1) atm128_stdout : 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 00 fb 00 00 00 00 [..............]
tos-set-symbol /path/to/main.exe MyModule__myVar=1234
This allows you to directly set the value of your desired variable. Just be careful, as any programmer should be, about variable types.
tos-set-symbols is part of the avr-gcc environment, and uses avr-objdump.
Initially we used this method to generate new images with different node IDs (TOS_NODE_ID variable) from the same base image. Now our testbed’s web based interface allows the user to draw a topology visually and assign such variable values to each of the nodes. It can also automatically map your desired topology to available nodes in the testbed.
