Wind River Blog: Using Lab Cloud to Communicate Hardware Setups to Software Developers

In a blog post at Wind River, I describe how the Wind River Helix Lab Cloud system can be used to communicate hardware design to software developers. The idea is that you upload a virtual platform to the cloud-based system, and then share it to the software developers. In this way, there is no need to install or build a virtual platform locally, and the sender has perfect control over access and updates. It is a realization of the hardware communication principles I presented in an earlier blog post on use cases for Lab Cloud.

But the past part is that the targets I talk about in the blog post and use in the video are available for anyone! Just register on Lab Cloud, and you can try your own threaded software and check how it scales on a simulated 8-core ARM!

 

 

 

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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Wind River Blog: Fault Injection using Simics – with Video

I just added a new blog post on the Wind River blog, about how you do fault injection with Simics. This blog post covers the new fault injection framework we added in Simics 5, and the interesting things you can do when you add record and replay capabilities to spontaneous interactive work with Simics. There is also a Youtube demo video of the system in action.

Security for IoT Panel at the DAC 2015 – Can Security Gate your Release?

etcI had the great honor to be on a panel discussing IoT Security at the DAC back in June. The panel was part of the Embedded Techcon event that took place essentially as a little embedded corner inside the DAC – it was held in a couple of conference rooms next to the regular DAC sessions, and attendees were also mostly attending the DAC in general. Not a bad idea for meshing embedded and hardware design. The panel was a great one, and David Kleidermacher from Blackberry gave me a great take-away: unless security is allowed to gate releases of products, it is hard to think you take security seriously.

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Security Now on Hacking Vehicles – A Bit of Let-Down

Security-Question-Shield-iconThe Security Now Podcast number 497 dealt with the topic of Vehicle Hacking. It was fairly interesting, if a bit too light on the really interesting thing which is what actually went on in the vechicle hack that was apparently demonstrated on US national television at some point earlier this year (I guess this CBS News transcript fits the description). It was still good to hear the guys from the Galois consulting firm (Lee Pike and Pat Hickey) talking about what they did. Sobering to realize just how little even a smart guy like Steve Gibson really knows about embedded systems and the reality of their programming. Embedded software really is pretty invisible in both a good way and a bad way.

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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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