Category: embedded software

UndoDB Live Recorder: Record/Replay for Live Systems

I undo-logohave a long-standing interested in debugging in general and reverse debugging in particular and the related idea of record-replay debug (see a series of blog posts I did a few years ago on the topic: history 1, history 2, history 3, S4D report, updates, Simics reverse execution, and then Lab Cloud record/replay). Recently, I found out that Undo Software, one of the pioneers in the field, had released a product called “Live Recorder“. So I went to check it out by reading their materials and comparing it to what we have seen before.

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In Defense of Testing and Testers

opinion I have been thinking about the role and prestige of testing for the past several years. Many things I have read and things companies have done indicate that “testing” is something that is considered a bit passe and old-school. Testers are dead weight that get into the way of releases, and they are unproductive barnacles that slow development down. Testers can all be replaced by automatic testing put in place by brilliant developers. The creative developer types are the guys with the status anyway. I might be exaggerating, but there is an issue here. I think we need to be acknowledge that testers are a critical part of the software quality puzzle, and that testing is not just something developers can do with one hand tied behind their back.

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Wind River Blog: The Trinity of Simulation

There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about the Trinity of Simulation – the computer, the system, and the world. It discusses how you build a really complete system model using not just a virtual platform like Simics, but you also integrate it with a model of the system the computer sits in, as well as the world around it. Like this:

 

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Read more about it in the blog post, and all the older blog posts it links to!

Single Programming Language? No Way! (For Real Work)

Last year, I concluded a programming project at work that clearly demonstrated that real programming tasks tend to involve multiple languages. I once made a remark to a journalist that there is a zoo of languages inside all real products, and my little project provided a very clear example of this. The project, as discussed previously, was to build an automated integration between a simple Simics target system and the Simulink processor-in-the-loop code testing system. In the course of this project, I used six or seven languages (depending on how you count), three C compilers, and three tools. Eight different compilers were involved in total.

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Wind River Blog: An Interview with Andreas Buchwieser about Safety Standards and Simics

There is a new post at my Wind River blog, an interview with Andreas Buchwieser from the Wind River office in München. It discusses how Simics can be applied to the field of safety-critical systems, including helping test the software to get it certified. Really interesting, and in particular it is worth noting that qualifying tools in the IEC 61508 and ISO 26262 context is much easier than in DO-178B/C. The industrial family of safety standards have been created to allow for tools to help validate an application without forcing incredibly high demands on the development of those tools.

 

Wind River Blog: Internet-of-Things Massive Simulation using Simics

There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about how Simics is used to simulate large wireless networks for IoT (Internet-of-Things) applications.

It is funny for me to be back at the IoT game. A decade ago (time flies, doesn’t it?), at Virtutech, I and Johan Runeson took part in an EU research project on exactly this topic. Unfortunately, we had to back out of that project due to economic circumstances and failing management commitment, but we still learnt a few things that were relevant now that we are back in the IoT game. In particular, how to simulate wireless networks in a reasonable way in a transaction-level simulator. Thus, payback for the investment took 10 years to arrive, but it did arrive. To me, that underscores the need to be a bit speculative, take some risk, and try to explore the future.

Speaking about Continuous Integration at the Embedded World Conference 2015

Embedded World 2015 Logo

I am going to be speaking at the 2015 Embedded World Conference in Nürnberg, Germany. My talk is about Continuous Integration for embedded systems, and in particular how to enable it using simulation technology such as Simics.

My talk is at 16.00 to 16.30, in session 03/II, Software Quality I – Design & Verification Methods.

 

 

Wind River Blog: Automatic Testing of Anything with Simics

There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about how you can use Simics to enable the automatic testing of pretty much any computer system (as long as we can put it inside a simulator). This is a natural follow-up to the earlier post about continuous integration with Simics and Simics-Simulink integrations — automated test runs is a mandatory and necessary part of all modern software development.

Intel Technology Journal on Simics

Simics_ITJ_180-wideThe September 2013 issue of the Intel Technology Journal (which actually arrived in December) is all about Simics. Daniel Aarno of Intel and I served as the content architects for the issue, which meant that we managed to contributed articles from various sources, and wrote an introductory article about Simics and its usage in general. It has taken a while to get this journal issue out, and now that it is done it feels just great! I am very happy about the quality of all the ten contributed articles, and reading the final versions of them actually taught me some new things you could do with Simics! I already wrote about the issue in a Wind River blog post, so in this my personal blog I want to be a little bit more, well, personal.

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Wind River Blog: Cyberphysical System Modeling with Simics

As an old embedded systems and real-time guy, I have always worked with computer systems that are in some way tied to their environment. Simics has often been used to model such computer systems, inside of customer organizations. Which makes it a bit hard to show… however, recently I have cooked up a demo showing Simics simulating a computer system alongside a physical system.

physics-3 I just put out a post on the Wind River blog, pointing to both a video of my own “water heater” demo and some other Youtube videos showing Simics integrated with simulations of the real world. A screenshot of my setup in action is shown on the side of this post.

 

Toyota Acceleration Case

I just read the EETimes coverage of the recently concluded court case in the US, where Toyota settled for 3 million USD in damages due to experts finding that the software in a 2005 Camry L4 could indeed cause “unintended acceleration”. In the particular case that was concluded, the accident resulting from the issue caused one driver to be injured and one driver to get killed. This feels like it could be the beginning of something really good, or just as well this could go really wrong.

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Book Review: Debugging

debugging book coverDebugging – the 9 Indispensable Rules for Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems by David Agans was published in 2002, based on several decades of practical experience in debugging embedded systems. Compared to the other debugging book I read this Summer, Debugging is much more a book for the active professional currently working on embedded products. It is more of a guidebook for the practitioner than a textbook for students that need to learn the basics.

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Book Review: If I Only Changed the Software, why is the Phone on Fire?

This blog post is a review of the book “If I Only Changed the Software, why is the Phone on Fire“, (see more information on Amazon, for example), by Lisa Simone. The book was released in 2007, on the Elsevier Newnes imprint. It is a book about debugging embedded systems, written in a murder-mystery style with a back story about the dynamics of an embedded development team. It sounds strange, but it works well.

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Logging (Some More Thoughts)

Logging as as debug method is not new, and I have been writing about it to and from over the past few years myself.  At the S4D conference, tracing and logging keeps coming up as a topic (see my reports from 2009, 2010  and 2012 ).  I recently found an interesting piece on logging from the IT world in the ACM Queue (“Advances and Challenges in Log Analysis“, Adam Oliner, ACM Queue December 2011).  Here, I want to address some of my current thoughts on the topic.

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S4D 2012 – Notes

Last week, I attended my fourth System, Software, SoC and Silicon Degug conference (S4D) in a row. I think the silicon part is getting less attention these days, most of the papers were on how to debug software. Often with the help of hardware, and with an angle to how software runs in SoCs and systems. I presented a paper reviewing the technology and history of reverse debugging, which went down pretty well.

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