membrowse

MemBrowse

A tool for analyzing binary size and memory footprint of embedded firmware. MemBrowse extracts detailed memory information from ELF files and linker scripts, providing symbol-level analysis with source file mapping for multiple architectures. Use it standalone for local analysis or integrate with MemBrowse for historical analysis and CI integration.

Features

• Architecture Agnostic: Works with architectures that produce ELFs with DWARF debug format
• Source File Mapping: Symbols are mapped to their definition source files
• Memory Region Extraction: Memory region capacity and layout are extracted from GNU LD and ICF linker scripts
• Cloud Integration: Upload reports to MemBrowse for historical tracking, diffs, monitoring and CI gating

CI/CD Integration

GitHub Actions

MemBrowse provides GitHub Actions for CI integration.

PR/Push Analysis

Create a Github action for PR analysis that will call membrowse/membrowse-action:

name: Memory Analysis
on: [push, pull_request]

jobs:
  analyze:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3

      - name: Build firmware
        run: make all # your build commands

      - name: Analyze memory
        uses: membrowse/membrowse-action@v1
        with:
          elf: build/firmware.elf # your elf
          ld: "src/linker.ld" # your ld scripts
          target_name: stm32f4 # the target name will be recognized by MemBrowse
          api_key: ${{ secrets.MEMBROWSE_API_KEY }}

      - name: Post PR comment
        if: github.event_name == 'pull_request'
        uses: membrowse/membrowse-action/comment-action@v1
        with:
          api_key: ${{ secrets.MEMBROWSE_API_KEY }}
          commit: ${{ github.event.pull_request.head.sha }}
          # Optional: use a custom Jinja2 template for the comment
          # comment_template: .github/membrowse-comment.j2

The comment action posts a memory report to the PR showing changes between the PR branch and the base branch. The report includes memory region utilization changes (e.g. FLASH, RAM), section-level deltas (e.g. .text, .bss, .data), and symbol-level changes — added, removed, modified, and moved symbols. If budget alerts are configured on MemBrowse, any exceeded budgets are highlighted in the comment.

You can customize the comment format by providing a Jinja2 template via the comment_template input. Your template receives a targets list (each with regions, sections, symbols, and alerts) and a top-level has_alerts boolean. See the default template for reference.

Tracking overflow past the real region size (optional limits)

By default, the linker refuses to produce an ELF when a region overflows, so there's nothing to analyze. If you want to keep building (and keep tracking memory growth) past that point, link against an inflated linker script whose LENGTH values are larger than the real target, and pass the real script as limits:

      - name: Analyze memory
        uses: membrowse/membrowse-action@v1
        with:
          elf: build/firmware.elf
          ld: "src/linker.inflated.ld"   # used for linking + section attribution
          limits: "src/linker.real.ld"   # real per-region LENGTH → utilization & overflow
          target_name: stm32f4
          api_key: ${{ secrets.MEMBROWSE_API_KEY }}

limits is optional — omit it when the binary fits the real layout (then ld is already the real limit). When supplied, section-to-region attribution still uses ld (so sections placed past the real end stay attributed to their region), and utilization / free / overflow are reported against each region's LENGTH from limits.

Historical Onboarding

For getting historical build data from day one upload the last N commits by Creating an Onboard Github action in your repo that will call membrowse/membrowse-action/onboard-action:

name: Onboard to MemBrowse
on: workflow_dispatch

jobs:
  onboard:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0