ZView

Introduction

ZView is a runtime visualizer for Zephyr RTOS applications, providing live system-wide thread and kernel object statistics via an SWD debug probe.

It reads kernel object locations and inspects memory through the APB bus ‘without halting’ the CPU, keeping the on-target footprint to nearly zero — no UART, no Shell, no additional Kconfig overhead beyond the standard thread introspection options.

The tool runs entirely on the host as a TUI application, displaying the live state of the application’s threads and kernel objects.

Usage with Zephyr

Declare the module in your workspace manifest, or pull it in via a submanifest. For example, create zephyrproject/zephyr/submanifests/zview.yaml with the following content:

manifest:
  projects:
    - name: zview
      url: https://github.com/wkhadgar/zview
      revision: main
      path: modules/tools/zview
      west-commands: scripts/west-commands.yml

Then update the workspace, build and flash the application, and run ZView through the integrated west command:

west update
west build -b <board> -S zview <app>
west flash
west zview

Note

The zview snippet is optional. ZView runs against any build of the application, but without the snippet some features, such as stack watermarks, thread names and CPU usage, may be unavailable, since they depend on Kconfig options that are disabled by default.

Refer to the ZView repository for the full list of supported options and CLI usage.

Reference

• ZView repository