Patent ID: 7669078

Claim:
A computer program product for debugging a first computer program, the first computer program executable on a first processor in a computer system, wherein the first processor is a specialized function processing unit (SPU), the computer program product having a tangible computer-readable medium with a debugging computer program embodied thereon, the debugging computer program comprising: computer code for activating a debugging program on a main processing unit (MPU) of the computer system, the MPU inoperable to access registers of the SPU directly; computer code for allocating, by the debugging program, a portion of a main memory of the computer system to store received SPU register contents; computer code for verifying, by the debugging program, that the first computer program is halted; computer code for activating, on the SPU, a second computer program; computer code for transferring, by the second computer program, SPU register contents to the allocated portion of the main memory; computer code for accessing, by the debugging program, the SPU register contents from the main memory; computer code for, subsequent to accessing the SPU register contents, inspecting the SPU register contents for errors; computer code for modifying, by the debugging program, the SPU register contents in the main memory, in response to inspecting the SPU register contents; computer code for transferring, by the second computer program, SPU register contents from the main memory to registers of the SPU; and computer code for restarting, by the debugging program, the SPU.