9.5. Coverage Analysis — RTEMS User Manual 5.4-rc2 (21st August 2026) documentation

# 9.5. Coverage Analysis

RTEMS is used in many critical systems. It is important that the RTEMS Project ensure that the RTEMS product is tested as thoroughly as possible. With this goal in mind, the RTEMS test suite was expanded with the goal that 100% of the RTEMS executive is tested.

RTEMS-TESTER takes the following arguments to produce coverage reports:

–coverage :

  When the coverage option is enabled the tester produces coverage reports for all the symbols in cpukit. To generate a coverage report for a specific symbol-set ( e.g.: score) the symbol-set is passed as an argument to the option, e.g.: –coverage=score.

–no-clean :

  Tells the script not to delete the .cov trace files generated while running the coverage. These trace files are used for debugging purposes and will not be needed for a normal user.

For example: To generate a coverage report of hello.exe for leon3 on SIS, the following command is used:

    rtems-test \
    --rtems-tools=$HOME/development/rtems/5 \
    --log=coverage_analysis.log \
    --no-clean \
    --coverage \
    --rtems-bsp=leon3-sis-cov \
    $HOME/development/rtems/kernel/leon3/sparc-rtems5/c/leon3/testsuites/samples/hello.exe

The command will create the coverage report in the following tree structure:

    ├── coverage_analysis.log
    ├── leon3-sis-coverage
    │   └── score
    │       ├── annotated.html
    │       ├── annotated.txt
    │       ├── branch.html
    │       ├── branch.txt
    │       ├── covoar.css
    │       ├── ExplanationsNotFound.txt
    │       ├── index.html
    │       ├── no_range_uncovered.html
    │       ├── no_range_uncovered.txt
    │       ├── NotReferenced.html
    │       ├── sizes.html
    │       ├── sizes.txt
    │       ├── summary.txt
    │       ├── symbolSummary.html
    │       ├── symbolSummary.txt
    │       ├── table.js
    │       ├── uncovered.html
    │       └── uncovered.txt
    └── leon3-sis-report.html

The html on top of the directory, i.e., leon3-sis-report.html is the top level navigation for the coverage analysis report and will let the user browse through all the generated reports from different subsystems.