I been listening to the SecurityNow! podcast raving about the coolness of the Yubikey, created by Swedish startup Yubico. It seems like the device has captured the imagination of quite a few people, and I have been kind of curious about it. So I was quite pleasantly surprised when I got one a few days ago, since we are testing it as a new way to authenticate to our VPN at work.
Monthly Archives: February 2009
I Got a Yubikey!
Off-Topic: Royal Marriage Coming Up!
Since I am a Swede I have to comment on the announcement yesterday that the Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden has announced her engagement and intent to marry next summer. The government has formally approved (which is their privilege according to the constitution).
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.
IBM z10 Heavy-Duty Virtual Platform
Unknown to most, IBM has one of the world’s longest records of using virtual platforms for software and firmware development and verification. This project has been ongoing since at least the days of the zSeries 900 machines, through z990, z9, and now z10. An excellent article on this virtual platform and its uses is found in the IBM Journal of Research and Development, number 1, 2009, . It is called “IBM System z10 Firmware Simulation”, by Körner et al.
Three Cores make a Crowd — or a Problem
A common question from simulation users to us simulation providers is “can I simulate a machine with N cores”, where N is “large”. As if running lots of cores was a simulation system or even a hardware problem. In almost all cases, the problem is with software. Creating an arbitrary configuration in a virtual platform is easy. Creating a software stack for that arbitrary platform is a lot harder, since an SMP software stack needs to understand about the cores and how they communicate.
Essentially, what you need is a hardware design that has addressing room for lots of cores, and a software stack that is capable of using lots of cores — even if such configurations do not exist in hardware. Unfortunately, since software is normally written to run on real existing machines, there tends to be unexpected limitations even where scalability should be feasible “in principle”.
Here is the story of how I convinced Linux to handle more than two cores in a virtual MPC8641D machine.
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 →