ZView

Introduction

ZView is a runtime visualizer for Zephyr RTOS applications, providing live system-wide thread and heap 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 live stack watermarks, CPU usage per thread, and heap runtime statistics.

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

Your application must be compiled and running with the appropriate Kconfig options. At minimum:

CONFIG_INIT_STACKS=y CONFIG_THREAD_MONITOR=y CONFIG_THREAD_STACK_INFO=y

Then update the workspace and run ZView through the integrated west command:

west update
west zview

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

Reference

ZView repository