An embedded researcher friend of mine has posted some data on code sizes from various compilers at http://embed.cs.utah.edu/embarrassing/. The “embarrassing” bit is the idea that compiler writes should be ashamed when other compilers do better than theirs. It is worth looking over the data, even though the methodology and benchmarks are not yet perfect by any means.
Category Archives: Embedded
MCC 2009 Presentations Online
The presentations from the 2009 Swedish Workshop on Multicore Computing (MCC 2009) are now online at the program page for the workshop. Let me add some comments on the workshop per se.
Freescale Online Fault-Tolerance “Demo”
I just spotted a fun little application on Freescale’s homepage: an interactive demo of the fault tolerance functions of the MPC564XL dual-core microcontroller.
IEEE Computer models@run.time
When I saw the cover of the October 2009 issue of IEEE Computer magazine, I was quite intrigued. Just what was “models@run.time”? I had never heard of the concept before, but it turned out to both simple and profound.
Finally, a Bug!
Part of my daily work at Virtutech is building demos. One particularly interesting and frustrating aspect of demo-building is getting good raw material. I might have an idea like “let’s show how we unravel a randomly occurring hard-to-reproduce bug using Simics“. This then turns into a hard hunt for a program with a suitable bug in it… not the Simics tooling to resolve the bug. For some reason, when I best need bugs, I have hard time getting them into my code.
I guess it is Murphy’s law — if you really set out to want a bug to show up in your code, your code will stubbornly be perfect and refuse to break. If you set out to build a perfect piece of software, it will never work…
So I was actually quite happy a few weeks ago when I started to get random freezes in a test program I wrote to show multicore scaling. It was the perfect bug! It broke some demos that I wanted to have working, but fixing the code to make the other demos work was a very instructive lesson in multicore debug that would make for a nice demo in its own right. In the end, it managed to nicely illustrate some common wisdom about multicore software. It was not a trivial problem, fortunately.
Ericsson Blog Post about DSL
Andras Vajda of Ericsson wrote an interesting blog post on domain-specific languages (DSLs). Thanks for some success stories and support in what sometimes feels like an uphill battle trying to make people accept that DSLs are a large part of the future of programming. In particular for parallel computing, as they let you hide the complexities of parallel programming.
The S4D Debug Conference
An unplanned and unexpected bonus with my trip to the FDL 2009 conference was the co-located S4D conference. S4D means System, Software, SoC and Silicon Debug, and is a conference that has grown out of some recent workshops on the topic of debugging, as seen from the perspective of hardware designers (mostly). S4D was part of the same package as FDL and DASIP, entrance to one conference got you into the other two too. As I did not know about S4D until quite late in the process, this was a great opportunity for me to look at what they were doing.
Freescale P4080, in Physical Form
Past Tuesday, I attended the Freescale Design With Freescale (DWF) one-day technology event in Kista, Stockholm. This is a small-scale version of the big Freescale Technology Forum, and featured four tracks of talks running from the morning into the afternoon. All very technical, aimed at designing engineers.
Can we Rely on C?
I have written several times on this blog about the odd propensity of the “EDA” business to consider the C and C++ languages “high level” languages. They are what I use almost daily for most of the demo-order programming I do, but I still don’t consider them very high-level. High-level for me is scripting (Python, Lua, …) or domain-specific languages (DML, Lex, Yacc, MatLab, …) or model-driven development (UML, LabView, Simulink, …) or languages which at least provide sensible and reasonably safe semantics (Erlang, Java, …).
However, in fact, most the embedded industry and the “virtual platform” industry rely on C and C++ to get our daily jobs done. Question is, how much longer can we expect to do that? An interesting post at Embedded.com by Michael Barr brought back my argument that modeling needs to move up in levels of abstraction just like mainstream programming.
Downloadable Book about Embedded Multicore
Freescale has now released the collected, updated, and restyled book version of the article series on embedded multicore that I wrote last year together with Patrik Strömblad of Enea, and Jonas Svennebring, and John Logan of Freescale. The book covers the basics of multicore software and hardware, as well as operating systems issues and virtual platforms. Obviously, the virtual platform part was my contribution.
Conquering Software with Software High-Level Synthesis
This post is a follow-up to the DAC panel discussion we had yesterday on how to conquer hardware-dependent software development. Most of the panel turned into a very useful dialogue on virtual platforms and how they are created, not really discussing how to actually use them for easing low-level software development. We did get to software eventually though, and had another good dialogue with the audience. Thanks to the tough DAC participants who held out to the end of the last panel of the last day!
As is often the case, after the panel has ended, I realized several good and important points that I never got around to making… and of those one struck me as worthy of a blog post in its own right.It is the issue of how high-level synthesis can help software design.
The Hardware-Software Interface is where the Action Is
When I started out doing computer science “for real” way back, the emphasis and a lot of the fun was in the basics of algorithms, optimizing code, getting complex trees and sorts and hashes right an efficient. It was very much about computing defined as processor and memory (with maybe a bit of disk or printing or user interface accessed at a very high level, and providing the data for the interesting stuff). However, as time has gone on, I have come to feel that this is almost too clean, too easy to abstract… and gone back to where I started in my first home computer, programming close to the metal.
Cadence Industry Insight: “Virtual Platforms Unite HW and SW”
Another Cadence guest blog entry, about the overall impact of virtual platforms on the interaction between hardware and software designers. Essentially, virtual platforms are a great tool to make software and hardware people talk to each other more, since it provides a common basis for understanding.
Guest Blog at Cadence: “Way Worse than the Real Thing”
Virtutech and Cadence yesterday announced the integration of Virtutech Simics and Cadence ISX (Incisive Software Extensions), which is essentially a directed random test framework for software. With this tool integration, you can systematically test low-level software and the hardware-software (device driver) interface of a system, leveraging a virtual platform.
EETimes.com – Multicore CPUs face slow road in comms
The EETimes article Multicore CPUs face slow road in comms piqued my interest. There is an interesting chart in there about just how slow more-than-one-core processors will be in penetrating a vaguely defined “comms” market place. I can believe that, but I think their comments on the PowerQUICC series require some commentary…
Adding to Schirrmeister’s Virtual Platform Myth Busting
Frank Schirrmeister of Synopsys recently published a blog post called “Busting Virtual Platform Myths – Part 1: “Virtual Platforms are for application software only”. In it, he is refuting a claim by Eve that virtual platforms are for application-level software-development only, basically claiming that they are mostly for driver and OS development and citing some Synopsys-Virtio Innovator examples of such uses. In his view, most appication-software is being developed using host-compiled techniques. I want to add to this refutal by adding that application-software is surely a very important — and large — use case for virtual platforms.
Eclipse Linux Kernel Indexing Works
Edited on 2009-Feb-01, to include the link to the illustrated guide that really helps you get there faster. Thanks Simon! Also, promoted to front page, original post was put up on 2008-Nov-09.
Thanks to Simon Kågströms post (and the even better second-generation with screenshots) about using Eclipse for the Linux kernel, I have a much nicer work environment now for my ongoing work in learning Linux device drivers on PowerPC, which has helped me work my way through several hard-to-figure-out system calls. Read More →
“Multicore Debug” Made Top Ten Embedded.com for 2008
Embedded.com just listed the ten most visited articles on their website during 2008, and my contribution on debugging multiprocessor code was number ten. If you want some more meat around multiprocessor debug, please peruse the various papers and presentations found on my personal website.
“Nulticore Effect”
Jack Ganssle wrote a column about the failure of multicore to scale, based on an article in IEEE Spectrum. He makes the following claim:
Now a study in IEEE Spectrum shows that even for the classic embarrassingly parallel problems like weather simulations multicore offers little benefit. The curve in that article is priceless. As the number of cores grow from two to 64 performance plummets by a factor of five. Additional processors nullify each other.
Call it the Nulticore Effect.
Off-Topic: The First Snow is Here
The first real snow reached Uppsala this weekend, lots of nice fluffy slippery cold snow on the ground and on the roads and everywhere else. It really is nice to have snow again, it lessens the effect of our dark winters and kind of puts you in a Christmas-like mood, especially now that the Christmas decorations are going up in town and shopping centers.
I also had to bring out the car for some errands and transports yesterday, and that new snow was probably the slipperiest I have ever driven on. It also provided an unsought opportunity for the electronic systems in our car to show themselves… both the stability and traction control and the anti-lock brakes were activated several times despite my pretty careful driving. For some reason, I never really believe that they would apply to me. I know that ESP and ABS are really good for safety, but for some reason I am a diehard skeptic that never quite believe these things work as they should. I guess this is another example of an embedded system that works as it should. Which really should not be a surprise.
Shaking a Linux Device Driver on a Virtual Platform
To continue from last week’s post about my Linux device driver and hardware teaching setup in Simics, here is a lesson I learnt this week when doing some performance analysis based on various hardware speeds.
Learning Linux Device Drivers on a Virtual PowerPC
There are times when working with virtual hardware and not real hardware feels very liberating and efficient (not to mention safe). Bringing up, modifying, and extending operating systems is one obvious such case. Recently, I have been preparing an open-source-based demonstration and education systems based on embedded PowerPC machines, and teaching myself how to do Linux device drivers in the process. This really brought out the best in virtual platform use.
Stackoverflow.com — Worth a Visit!
I have recently discovered stackoverflow.com and I must say it is something I very much recommend. The idea is simple, and the details rich and interesting.